Every gauge.
Every lever.
By design.
Every lever.
By design.
Without losing why you started.
Lug Nut Labs is a boutique strategic advisory firm for early-stage founders who are already in motion — and ready to build with structure, clarity, and intention.
Who This Is For
Customers, revenue, attention — the company is moving. But effort stops compounding. Clarity around what actually moves the needle starts to erode.
The real enemy is structural drift. That's exactly what Lug Nut Labs was built to solve.
Work with MoniqueEvery decision, every context-switch still runs through you. The company is growing but the operating system hasn't caught up.
The team is working, but the work doesn't add up to cumulative momentum. Busy is a poor substitute for compounding.
You've handed things off but retained the load in a different form. The drag didn't disappear. It just moved.
You care about integrity, standards, and sustainability. You're looking for a thinking partner who gets it — not more noise.
Strategic Advisory
Lug Nut Labs works with a small number of early-stage founders at a time — taking equity stakes in exchange for high-touch strategic support. This is closer to having a Chief of Staff and strategic partner embedded in your business than anything that resembles traditional consulting.
Clarifying what the company is actually optimizing for — and making sure every major decision points in the same direction. Priority setting, sequencing, and decision architecture.
Turning strategy into structure that holds. Operating cadence, delegation design, founder role clarity, and the systems that let the company run without the founder carrying everything.
Sharpening how you talk about the company to customers, investors, and partners. Pricing power, brand coherence, and the story that makes the right people pay attention.
Mapping the relationships that actually move the company forward and designing how to cultivate them — investors, collaborators, channel partners — with intention.
Designing a founder role that is high-leverage and coherent — so you can lead well without burning out or becoming the bottleneck your own company grows around.
Decision support during the moments that actually define a company — pivots, raises, key hires, and the strategic crossroads that require synthesis over frameworks.
Equity-based model. Lug Nut Labs takes a small equity stake in exchange for strategic advisory — which means we're genuinely invested in your outcomes. We work with a limited number of founders at a time, so every engagement stays high-context and high-trust. Reach out and let's have a conversation.
Who We Work With
We work best with founders building category-defining businesses with integrity, clarity, and durable structure. The through-line across sectors is orientation — a belief that how you build matters as much as what you build.
See the SectorsPerpetual busyness with no room to think — that's a load-bearing problem, not a badge of honor.
Work With MoniqueLug Nut Labs is built for founders who want to scale without burning out, without losing their standards, and without becoming the bottleneck in their own business. Well-built companies compound. That's the whole idea.
What Founders Say
Four months after pivoting our business model with Lug Nut Labs' strategic guidance, we're close to closing our first million-dollar contract. This turnaround happened after we laid off our entire team and lost investor backing. As a solo founder managing a complete business transformation with zero team and no investor support, I needed a strategic partner who could navigate unconventional paths to success. Rather than walking away during our most challenging period, Monique doubled down on our potential. She systematically organized every step of our pivot strategy — from drafting business development materials to sourcing additional talent. Monique has the gift of listening to what the vision is and serving in its name with minimal effort on my part, which is crucial as a founder navigating crisis. Four months from crisis to million-dollar opportunity speaks for itself.
I came to Monique in the earliest stages of Selah — before we had real traction, before we had a clear story, before a lot of things were figured out. What she gave me wasn't a generic growth plan. She helped me understand what we were actually building and why it mattered, then helped me communicate that in a way that finally resonated — with users, with partners, with the people we needed to believe in us. She has a gift for taking a flood of information and cutting through to what's essential. I felt seen as a founder in a way that I hadn't before, and that made all the difference.
I hired Monique because I wanted our brand embodied by someone as brave, kind, and eloquent as she is. What I didn't expect was how quickly our weekly syncs would become executive coaching sessions I didn't know I needed. She took complete ownership of rebranding the company — from strategy brief to agency handoff — and brought the kind of rigor and creative instinct that made everyone's job easier, including mine. She has an uncanny ability to hold the granular and the strategic at the same time, and she brings that to everything she touches.
Monique is the rarest kind of operator — a genuine generalist who makes unexpected connections across strategy, storytelling, and execution without losing the thread on any of them. As my Chief of Staff, she consistently sought out problems the rest of the leadership team didn't have bandwidth for and ran with them — proactively, with a strong "why," and always with more rigor than I anticipated. Honestly? I told her early on: I'll probably be working for Monique one day.
We're especially drawn to founders building something meaningful — and who understand that how you build matters as much as what you build.
Physical and mental health, wellbeing, performance, and recovery. Founders designing for how people actually feel — and building the infrastructure to support it at scale.
Food systems, agriculture, materials, and responsible production. Founders who believe impact and excellence belong together — and are proving it through how they build.
Reimagined work, culturally aligned infrastructure, and human-centered systems. Founders building for a future where progress actually strengthens the communities it touches.
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Working with Mae has been a great way to make sure our experience is headed in the right direction. Her quality and timeliness of work has helped us exceed our outreach goals which is essential to our growth.
Lab Notes
Practical thinking on strategy, execution, delegation, and the decisions that define early-stage companies.
Monique Claiborne
Founder & Principal Advisor, Lug Nut Labs
About Monique
Monique Claiborne is the founder of Lug Nut Labs — a strategic operator who has spent her career at the intersection of startups, social impact, and global markets. She works with early-stage founders, especially those who are underestimated or building outside the dominant scripts of startup culture, to help them move from raw traction to coherent, sustainable growth.
Her edge is synthesis. She can hold strategy, structure, narrative, delegation, and ecosystem in view at the same time — and help founders see clearly which lever actually matters right now. Her work is grounded in a deep belief that the founders most worth backing are often the ones who haven't had the easiest path in, and that the best companies are built with as much care for how they grow as how fast.
Before founding Lug Nut Labs, Monique built her career across senior roles in strategy, brand, and operations — working closely with founders and leadership teams navigating inflection points, positioning pivots, and the hard work of turning vision into something that holds under pressure. She has worked across startups, social enterprises, and global development initiatives, bringing a cross-sector perspective that is rare in traditional advisory contexts.
Monique is a Princeton University alumna and a Henry Luce Scholar — a distinction awarded to a small group of emerging leaders selected for a year of immersive professional experience across Asia. That formative experience deepened her instinct for cross-cultural systems thinking and reinforced her belief that the most durable ideas travel far.
She founded Lug Nut Labs on a simple premise: the most transformative support a founder can receive is often not the loudest or the flashiest. It's the overlooked structural point — the lug nut — that makes motion hold.
Start Here
If you're an early-stage founder who wants a genuine strategic partner — reach out. Let's see if it's a fit.