About Lead Wolf
Starting a business took courage. Growing it takes the same kind.
Lead Wolf is a studio in Bird Rock, La Jolla. You bring what you’re trying to make happen. I find what’s standing in the way, and we build what the business actually needs to get there.
The name
Two wolves. The one you feed leads.
There’s an old story about two wolves inside every person. One runs on fear: play it safe, don’t look too closely, wait until next quarter. The other runs on courage: take the first step, take the risk, look at the real numbers. They fight all the time. The one that wins is the one you feed.
If you own a business, you’ve already fed the brave one. You signed the lease, made payroll, bet on yourself. That takes more courage than most people ever use.
After the doors open, fear gets fed quietly: money nobody checks, a message nobody questions, a problem everyone walks around.
That’s what the Wolf Audit is for. It shows which wolf the business has been feeding: what runs on habit, and what’s actually working. Then we feed the right one.
Lead Wolf isn’t the alpha at the front of the pack. It’s the wolf you choose to let lead.
The co-founder
Eve Gonzalez
CFO, executive producer & co-founder
Eve runs the money and the operations at Lead Wolf, and she’s the executive producer on our productions.
Her background is in graphic design, marketing and PR. She started in LA’s garment district.
The founder
Oscar “Oz” Riveros
Founder & lead strategist
Oz has worked nearly every job a business has. He started at the front of the house: front desk, concierge, and butler to film stars, rock stars and CEOs, where the job is noticing what someone needs before they ask. He has managed properties. He is a musician, graphic designer, photographer, filmmaker, director and director of photography, and his films have won awards.
On the business side, his work has always been about changing how a business runs, not just how it looks. He helped promote and market a reservation and point-of-sale system from start to finish. He led marketing as vice president for a group of California resorts, was a strategist at a San Diego creative agency, and sat beside the CEO of a San Diego property company as chief strategy officer. In 2021 he started Lead Wolf.
From every one of those seats he saw the same thing: a business gets sold a service before anyone finds what’s actually holding it back. Lead Wolf is built the other way around. Start with the goal. Understand the whole system. Find the constraint. Then decide what to build.
That range is also why the audit works. He can sit with the owner on the P&L, with the team on the plan, with the front desk on the script and with the crew on set, and see how each one moves the others.
Most people are creative or analytical. The work here comes from being both.
Experience
What he brings to a business.
Purpose
Why the business exists and who it’s for, in words the whole team can repeat. Every decision after that gets measured against it.
Clarity
The whole business on one page: the customer journey, the systems behind it and where money leaks. The owner and the team point at the same page to decide what comes next.
Analytics
The numbers that actually run the business, read straight. Tracking that counts sales, not clicks, and reports that match your own books.
Practicality
Fixes sized to the business you have, not the one in a pitch deck. The simplest thing that works, built so your people can run it on a normal Tuesday.
Honesty
If something isn’t working, you hear it first, including when it’s our work. If there’s nothing worth fixing, I’ll say so.
Results
Every recommendation ties back to a goal you can measure: calls, bookings, orders, revenue, margin. Then we look at what happened and decide what’s next.
How we work
Diagnose. Build and deploy. Prove.
01
Diagnose
I look at the whole business before anything gets built: the goal, the offer, the customer journey, the data, the people who answer the phone. Not just the part you called about.
02
Build & deploy
We build the fix with the right team for the job and put it to work, connected to the people and systems that have to use it. A deliverable sitting in a folder hasn’t done anything yet.
03
Prove
What happened, where people stopped and what we change next, in numbers you can check against your own books. From the diagnosis to the monthly review, you deal with the person who’s accountable.
Most owners don't need another vendor. They need someone who'll tell them the truth about what's working, what's wasted, and who's accountable for it.
The crew
The right people for the job.
We don’t keep a fixed roster and bend your job to fit it. We put together the right people for the work: the core team below, plus the specialists a job calls for. You still deal with one person from the first conversation to the monthly numbers.
Michael Soares
Writer & director
Writes and directs. Film and TV training at San Diego State, plus the production and business side of the work.
Eli Koehler
Videographer & key grip
Camera and lights. Cinematographer and key grip on Lead Wolf shoots.
Emily Holmes
Set designer
Builds the set: props, dressing, the look of the room.
Hilary Soriano
Casting producer
Casting. Brings film-industry experience to finding and securing the right talent, from auditions to on-set.
Jorge Moreno
Creative producer
Marketing and creative direction for food brands. Graphic design background, rooted in Mexico City and San Diego.
The studio
One roof in Bird Rock.
Workshops, audits, shoots, edits, and the monthly review of your numbers — all in one building in La Jolla. Come see it.
Where
Bird Rock, La Jolla
Visits
By appointment
You meet
The people doing the work
Who we work with
Owners already spending on their business who want to see clearly.
Hospitality, med spa and healthcare, supplements and product brands, local service businesses. Founder- and operator-led companies in San Diego.
Hablamos español
El diagnóstico, la llamada y los hallazgos — en español si lo prefieres.
Questions
Straight answers.
What are you — an agency?
Not in the usual sense. An agency sells you a service. We start with what you’re trying to make happen, find what’s in the way, then build whatever the business actually needs: sometimes a film, sometimes the ads, sometimes the tracking, the follow-up or a system behind the scenes. The diagnosis, the making and the reporting all happen under one roof.
Why Lead Wolf?
Most owners don’t need another vendor. They need someone who’ll tell them the truth about what’s working, what’s wasted and who’s accountable for it. I look at the business before anything gets built: the offer, the message, the tracking, the whole customer journey. Then we build the fix with the right team for the job, whatever it turns out to be. One person accountable from the diagnosis to the numbers.
What does “Lead Wolf” mean?
There’s an old story about two wolves inside every person, one fed by fear and one by courage. The one you feed leads. Starting a business means you’ve already fed the brave one. The Wolf Audit shows which one the business has been feeding since. Lead Wolf is the one you choose to let lead.
Who is behind Lead Wolf?
Oz Riveros founded and runs it. He has worked at almost every level of a business, from a resort front desk to chief strategy officer. He reads a P&L, audits an ad account, directs a commercial and sets up the systems that tie them together. Behind him is a core team, plus the specialists each job calls for, chosen for the work.
What industries do you specialize in?
Hospitality, med spa and healthcare, supplements and product brands, and local service businesses: owner- and operator-led companies already investing in the business who want to see clearly. We work in English and Spanish.
The next step
Tell us what you’re trying to make happen.
45 minutes, free for qualified businesses. You leave with three things to fix, in writing. If we can’t find anything worth fixing, we’ll say so.
45′ · three things to fix