Built by a Master Black Belt who has lived the problem

Meet the founder

I’m Mike Higgins, founder of ConsusOne and the person behind Sensei Elite.

My career began in service. I served in the U.S. Air Force from 1985 to 1992 and am a veteran of Operation Desert Storm. That experience — discipline, mission focus, and making things work under real constraints — shaped how I’ve approached every problem since.

It also led me somewhere unexpected. In the mid-1990s I went to the Balkans during one of its hardest chapters and spent 1994 to 1996 doing humanitarian relief in Bosnia — as a Logistics Officer with the International Rescue Committee and as Post-War Housing Reconstruction Manager for the Bihać region with the United Methodist Committee on Relief. That work — rebuilding under the hardest possible conditions — is still the lens I bring to every problem.

I stayed to help rebuild the economy, too. From 1996 to 2001 I helped launch Coca-Cola Hellenic operations in post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina — building the supply chain, procurement, logistics, and production functions from the ground up. The business reached profitability within three years and became the first major foreign investment in the country after the war. It taught me two things that still drive me: how to build operations from nothing, and how to make them work in the hardest environments.

Over the next two decades I became a Lean Six Sigma practitioner, coach, and program leader. I earned my Six Sigma Black Belt at the University of Michigan in 2003 and my Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt through Accenture/George Group in 2010. Along the way I’ve coached Green, Black, and Master Black Belts, built belt-training programs from scratch, and led enterprise transformations measured in the tens of millions.

I’ve seen Lean Six Sigma work — and I’ve seen it stall. The pattern was always the same: strong methodology, motivated people, and then friction. Daily audits get skipped. Practitioners get stuck between coaching sessions and make a weak decision rather than wait. That observation is why Sensei Elite exists.

Work that has spanned the globe

Operational excellence isn’t only an American discipline, and my career has taken me well beyond it. I’ve led projects and transformations on four continents — including Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Turkey, Russia, Kazakhstan, Lebanon, Uganda, and Australia — across cultures, languages, and operating conditions ranging from Fortune 500 plants to post-war and developing economies. Working effectively in that many environments builds an adaptability you can’t learn in a classroom: the ability to read a new context quickly and make improvement stick within it.

Credentials & background

• U.S. Air Force veteran — Operation Desert Storm (served 1985–1992)
• Humanitarian relief service — International Rescue Committee (Logistics Officer) and United Methodist Committee on Relief (Post-War Housing Reconstruction Manager, Bihać region), post-war Bosnia (1994–1996)
• Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt — Accenture / George Group, 2010
• Six Sigma Black Belt — University of Michigan, 2003
• Project Management Professional (PMP) — 2017
• MBA — University of Maryland Global Campus
• BS, Industrial Technology — Southern Illinois University, Carbondale

Where I’ve done the work

Across industries and sectors, including:

• Defense & government — U.S. Navy, Army, and Marine Corps (NAVAIR / AIRSPEED), U.S. Army Materiel Command, and the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission
• Energy & oil and gas — EP Energy, Chevron
• Consumer goods & beverage — Coca-Cola Enterprises, Coca-Cola Hellenic, PepsiCo
• Healthcare — a Johns Hopkins–affiliated hospital network
• Banking & utilities — Sberbank Russia, Western Power (Australia)
• Paper & packaging — WestRock / Smurfit Westrock (Enterprise Master Black Belt)
• International & NGO — United Nations Peacekeeping operations across Africa and the Middle East

Representative results

• Launched Coca-Cola operations in post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina — built supply chain, procurement, logistics, and production from the ground up; profitable within three years and the country’s first major post-war foreign investment.
• $25M+ in enterprise hard savings across procurement, order-to-cash, master data, and IT as an Enterprise Master Black Belt.
• $7M+ margin impact (vs. a $4.5M goal) leading customer-facing process transformation.
• $3M–$6M in annual savings transforming oil-field operations, while cutting average project cycle time from 220 to 130 days.
• Changeover time cut from 12 hours to 5.5 hours in under 60 days at a PepsiCo Gatorade plant using SMED and value-stream mapping.
• 30% cycle-time reduction in six weeks transforming a United Nations shared-service center, training 225 employees in Lean Six Sigma (Uganda and Lebanon).
• +70% on-time surgery starts at a Johns Hopkins–affiliated hospital, expanding capacity with no added investment (Turkey).
• Created the proposal for the first agentic-AI solution at a Fortune 500 packaging company, targeting quote turnaround of 2.5 days down to under 15 minutes.

Why I built Sensei Elite

I founded ConsusOne on a simple principle: make the right thing to do, the easy thing to do. Lean Six Sigma programs don’t fail because the methodology is broken — they fail because behavioral friction, time pressure, and accountability gaps make execution harder than abandonment. When friction is high, people default to the path of least resistance.

Sensei Elite flips that equation for the individual practitioner. It’s a 24/7 AI coach that’s there the moment you’re stuck — at 4pm before a deadline, or at 2am when your next coaching session is days away. It doesn’t do the work for you, the way a generic chatbot would. It coaches you the way a good Master Black Belt does: asking the question that makes you find the answer, holding DMAIC and Kaizen phase discipline, and building the critical-thinking capability that compounds across every project you run.

There’s a personal reason, too. I’ve spent years coaching practitioners, and the hardest part was never being able to be there at the exact moment someone got stuck. I built Sensei Elite to give every practitioner who is working to build real capability the 24/7 coaching I always wished I could be there to provide myself — the coach I’d want at my own side, available the moment it’s needed.

AI doesn’t replace human expertise. It removes the friction that keeps expertise from being applied consistently. That’s the whole idea behind Sensei Elite.