Service
See what the work asks of the people closest to customers.
About Portage
Serious operating thinking. Grounded in how work actually gets done.
Built in Minnesota. Serving growing organizations, with specialized work in Minnesota community care.
Founder + Advisor
Dawon Bahtuoh
Dawon Bahtuoh brings experience across frontline service, restaurant management, finance, and enterprise workforce strategy.
At Target, he served as a Senior Business Partner in Strategic Workforce Planning, helping senior leaders connect business priorities with workforce capacity, organization design, and investment decisions.
His earlier experience includes running a restaurant business, customer service, and financial analysis—giving him a practical view of how decisions affect the people doing the work.
He holds Cornell certificates in Human Resources Management, HR Transformation, and Business Strategy.
Four vantage points
Experience across the work, the business, and the organization.
Operations
Understand how priorities, handoffs, and exceptions play out day to day.
Finance
Connect choices to business constraints and tradeoffs.
Enterprise workforce strategy
Link business priorities, demand, workforce capacity, and organizational choices.
For smaller organizations, that means connecting work, capacity, roles, decisions, and practical constraints without importing enterprise-sized bureaucracy.
The approach
Evidence before prescription.
Recommendations should fit the question. Portage reviews what is actually happening, tests more than one explanation, and recommends the smallest useful next step supported by the evidence.
Good advice can mean pausing a change or involving a specialist.
Start here
What decision are you trying to make?
Bring the situation, what you have already tried, and the change you are considering. You do not need the diagnosis before the conversation.