About SDG Strategy
Who We Are and What We Do
I’ve recently refocused my consulting business on helping business owners prepare for their exit from the businesses they’ve built, whether that’s an imminent event, or many years away. A big part of that refocusing has been redesigning my website to meet the needs of those business owners and to help explain how I can help them.
The section of my website that is hardest for me is the “About Us” page. The name of my company comes from the Latin term Soli Deo Gloria, which means “to God alone be the glory”, so talking about myself is hard and feels a little hypocritical, but I know that potential clients want to know who I am and why they should believe that I can help them. So this week I finally bit the bullet and updated that content to reflect my new focus.
As you hear me talk about how God has wired me, the gifts and talents He has blessed me with, the experiences He’s led me through, and how all of that translates into ways that I can help others, please hear me in that “Soli Deo Gloria” spirit — acknowledging God’s goodness to me and through me rather than anything I can boast in for myself. You can either watch the video (below), read the script (the main body of this article), or visit the About Us page on my site.
Thanks for your interest in SDG Strategy. I want to give you a glimpse into how God has blessed me to be well positioned to help you, and what it is that I do through SDG Strategy. I will start with a short answer. For many, that will be enough, but for those that want to know more, I will dive deeper into how God has shaped me and blessed me with gifts and experiences to prepare me to help business owners like you.
The Short Answer
The short version of who I am and what I do is that God has enabled me to help business owners create value through their businesses by gifting me with a mind that sees opportunities, creates structure for pursuing those opportunities, and can clearly communicate those opportunities and plans so that together we can execute the plans to capture the opportunities.
He has also given me experiences which have allowed me to put my mind to work in practical ways that now can benefit the business owners I serve. He has given me opportunities to start and run businesses, knowing what it means to care about customers, to build and grow teams, and care about business finances. He has also given me opportunities to lead cross-functional teams in companies large and small to create value, whether that be through organic and transactional business growth, creating new products, markets, and even industries, or through cutting costs.
He has blessed me with mentors who have not only taught me how to run successful companies, but businesses that honor God and love our neighbors. Thanks to God’s many blessings, today I believe that I am well positioned to help business owners increase the value they create through their businesses, no matter what industry they are in, or what their specific circumstances.
So, what do I do?
You can learn much more detail on my website at SDGStrategy.com under the Services section, but in short, I work with business owners and their teams to improve their business performance today, maximize the value of their business whenever they plan to exit, and align their business with their personal values and faith.
I generally do this using the Value Acceleration Methodology developed by the Exit Planning Institute. We walk through three phases in most engagements.
The first phase is called Discover and in it we uncover all of the opportunities to improve the business. These opportunities include strengthening values alignment, improving business performance, reducing risks, strengthening intangible capital such as customer relationships, processes, and systems, and preparing both the business and the business owner for life after exit. The Discover phase culminates in a roadmap — a plan for how we can address these opportunities, including prioritization and sequencing of activities.
The second phase is called Prepare and it is the execution of that roadmap. We do this through what are called 90-day sprints. Each quarter we identify a small number, typically 3 to 5 of the opportunities to pursue, assign an internal owner to each, develop a plan for each, and intensely focus for 90 days on addressing that opportunity. I provide coaching to the internal owners and facilitate monthly accountability workshops to keep our work on track and aligned. At the end of each quarter we review where we are and either start the next 90-day sprint or move into the final phase. It’s not unusual to keep cycling through the Prepare phase for a couple of years (or more) to dramatically improve the business.
When the timing is right, and both the business and the business owner are ready, we enter the third phase which is called Exit. During this phase we typically beef up the team significantly by bringing in the right specialists for the exit options that make sense for your business and your goals. We do a lot of preparation work before approaching any potential counter-parties to make sure that your business presents well and that the process will progress smoothly.
While there are some well-defined processes and tools that we use throughout the Value Acceleration Methodology, in reality, everything is customized to you. A key element of the Discover phase is understanding what matters most to you, and everything else flows from that. For some clients, we move as quickly as is prudent to the Exit phase. For others, we Prepare for a year or two and then slow everything down for several years until the timing is right for Exit. Bottom line, it’s all about serving you, your business and your needs, not serving the process and the methodology.
The Longer Answer
To give you a longer answer of how God has prepared me for this work will require me to talk through three topics:
- How I’m wired
- What experiences God has blessed me with
- How all of that helps me create value for clients
How I’m Wired
God made me to be a very logical, structured person. Those that have worked with me for a long time who are reading this probably chuckled a moment ago. They are very familiar with me saying something like “Three things come to mind…” and then laying out my thoughts in a very structured manner. So now I’m telling you three things about me, which is very true to my character.
I’m also very efficiency-minded. I am always asking myself if there’s a more efficient way to do something. Sometimes that’s a curse, but usually it’s a blessing. I’ve always been able to get stuff done faster than most others — whether that be writing software or thinking through a complex problem or writing a document. These aspects of my nature are why I studied engineering at university.
Throughout my life I’ve also been a collector of tools. Yes, I have lots of gadgets in my home that theoretically make life more efficient, but I am also a collector of tools for working through problems and decisions in running a business or setting a strategy. You can see some of those tools at my website SDGStrategyLab.com or more simply stratlab.cc.
I’m also a big fan of data, analytics and information. Of course I wear a smartwatch that tells me all kinds of data about my daily activity, and I have lots of spreadsheets tracking data and looking for trends and patterns that can help me improve my life as well as obviously, helping my clients in their businesses.
That trend spotting probably also contributes to another important aspect of who I am. I think of myself as a visionary. I tend to see things that are happening and extrapolate them forwards in time, so I tend to be ahead of the curve on things like new technologies.
For example, I was into computers well before they were common so I was asked to set up the first personal computer lab at my high school. In the early 1990s, I saw the potential for the Internet and my boss and I built a team to pursue those opportunities. When our new CEO told us to shut down the Internet projects, we, along with the Internet expert leading that team, quit our jobs to co-found the first web development company in Oklahoma.
In the early 2000s, I recognized how wireless and mobility would impact our lives and our businesses. A major publisher agreed and contracted me to write a book about it. I submitted the manuscript for that book the same month that Steve Jobs announced the iPhone.
God has blessed me to see where things are going, understand what is possible, understand the implications for how we are operating today, and recognize what’s going to have to change.
God has also helped me become an excellent communicator. I’m told that I write well and I’ve written several books. I enjoy public speaking and have been invited as keynote speaker at major industry conferences. Perhaps most importantly, I think I’m good at explaining complex topics in ways that more people can understand. You can follow my writing at my online publication ClearPurpose.media.
Even though I enjoy public speaking, standing on stage and sharing insights with a room full of people, I’m more of a listener in one-on-one conversations. Before forming and sharing my opinions, I want to fully understand the context and your perspectives. Mostly I ask questions. I’m told that I ask good questions. I’m naturally curious and love to learn new things, but more than anything, my logical, structured mind kicks in and one question leads to another and often a string of questions will walk someone down the logical path to the answer they were searching for.
To some extent, I see the world in black and white terms. I have no problem seeing and pointing out the challenges and looming issues in businesses. Sometimes I come across as too direct when sharing my insights with others, but I can’t ignore the truth and I want us to be working together to fix problems. That also makes me very comfortable with people who are direct with me. Most of the time I’m pretty coachable. I want to do what it takes to help make us both successful.
Hopefully that gives you a good sense for who I am. God has taken that nature and has provided me with a pretty interesting mix of experiences that have helped me be able to apply who I am to creating value in a broad array of situations.
My Experiences
My parents were both from Missouri, but my dad was an officer in the Navy, so we moved a lot when I was young. I graduated high school in Northern Virginia, near Washington, D.C.
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During my college years God blessed me with some great experiences including a year of study in England, a couple of summers developing engagement and training software in the defense industry, and a summer internship in Finland developing firmware for the nuclear power industry. Both of those jobs were working on mission critical systems, with lives at stake, which taught me the seriousness of the work we do, and both involved working on what today we would call the user experience — understanding the unique needs of the users and how to enable them to simply and naturally perform otherwise complex tasks.
After earning my bachelors degree in Electrical Engineering from Virginia Tech, I was blessed with a job as Software Engineer for Northern Telecom in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. Nortel was one of the largest companies in the telecom industry and I was part of a great team doing fun and challenging work, but I also experienced some of the challenges of working for a big company.
My next stop was Tulsa, Oklahoma where I was blessed with a more positive big company experience. The Williams Companies was, and is, a Fortune 500 company, primarily in the Energy industry.
I was hired as a software engineer working on network management software for WilTel. WilTel was an internal startup formed to leverage the company’s pipeline assets to build one of the first fiber optic networks to serve the then recently deregulated and rapidly growing competitive long distance industry. Specifically I was hired to work on, and then lead a project to apply WilTel’s software to manage the voice and data network of one of their largest customers.
After that project was a success, I was asked to travel the country talking to dozens of other large customers to determine whether this was a product we should formally develop and broadly launch. At the end of my travels, I presented the business case to the senior management team. They rejected the product idea but appreciated the approach I took to analyzing it, which opened the door for my move into the product development organization.
I was given the fun opportunity to become the company’s first manager of new product concepts, launching our first formal product development process, and shepherding new ideas through a cross-functional concept-to-launch journey.
My boss and I also championed a number of Internet initiatives. For nearly 25 years, the Internet had been the exclusive domain of the military, academic, and research communities with commercial use strictly prohibited by federal law. That was starting to change and we built a small team of brilliant and talented young professionals to explore how we could participate. We built our industry’s first commercial website, partnered with the Chamber of Commerce to give Tulsa one of the first municipal business presences on the web, and through our telecom facilities played a central role in interconnecting all of the players in the rapidly growing commercial Internet industry.
It was exciting times, but it was at just this moment that I experienced the mergers-and-acquisitions world for the first time. Williams agreed to sell WilTel’s fiber network to a rapidly growing competitor called LDDS. The deal was scheduled to close January 5, 1995 and in mid-December 1994, the CEO of LDDS called my boss and I into a meeting to hear about all the activity we were managing in our new product pipeline. That’s when he told us to shut down the Internet work because, as he put it, “the Internet is a toy; businesses will never pay for it.”
Keep in mind that Yahoo was incorporated in 1995, Amazon sold their first book in 1995, eBay held their first auction in 1995, and the founders of Google met in 1995, so none of that had happened yet. It wasn’t as crazy as it sounds now, but we were pretty sure he was wrong. That night, my boss Gordon, David, the guy on our team leading all the Internet work, and I met and started working on our business plan to start the first web development firm in Oklahoma.
We launched Digital Frontiers three months later and God blessed us with immediate success. So much so that it quickly led to my first exit as a business owner. We sold the business to the Williams Companies. Yes, the company that sold us to LDDS bought us back as Digital Frontiers. More importantly, they fully supported our Internet vision, funding expansion from just web development into building our own Internet backbone network, and working with companies like Cisco and Sun Microsystems to develop new products for businesses anxious to join the new information superhighway. Yes, businesses were willing to pay for it!
Our Internet business was just one small piece of a larger collection of telecom businesses that Williams was re-assembling. A couple of years in, I was blessed with the opportunity to develop a strategy for building a new fiber optic network using new rights of way Williams had acquired. That assignment eventually led to me becoming Vice President of Strategic Development for the newly formed Williams Communications Group. We enjoyed a record-setting Initial Public Offering on the New York Stock Exchange for WCG in October 1999, my second (partial) business exit as owner of a very small piece of what God had turned into a very valuable business.
A few months later, after much prayer, God led me to leave Williams and join a boutique consulting firm as vice president and chief strategist, helping telecom companies launch innovative new products and services. The years I spent at TeleChoice were very rewarding. The founder and the president had built an incredible team of wonderful, smart, creative people from whom I learned much.
But the real learning came from the work we did for our clients. We realized that we were different from other consulting firms, not showing up with an army of analysts to do the work, but rather serving as catalysts, asking clients the right questions, accelerating their work of getting to the right answers, and helping the clients learn how to do it themselves the next time.
As TeleChoice began to wind down, I felt called to start Seek First Networks, an Internet software company focused on making it easy for small churches and ministries to leverage the Web. I spent a couple of years building out the technology and running some small trials.
But then I got a call from the former CEO of WCG. He was serving as president of the business-focused division of Sprint and needed a strategy lead. After much prayer I decided to join Sprint and turn Seek First into an open source project. Over the next few years churches in dozens of countries were able to leverage the Seek First technology to serve their members.
My family and I moved to Kansas City and I became director of strategic planning for Sprint Business Solutions. One of the first challenges we faced was with the long distance business. Although the entire long distance industry was in decline, this business had consistently generated billions of dollars in cash to fund Sprint’s growth in wireless. Our projections showed that cash flow would go negative within a few years, so drastic actions were needed.
I led a cross-functional effort to identify various strategic alternatives and worked with the leadership team through the decision making process to a strategy we called Extreme Discipline. The resulting plans to sell off product lines, exit unprofitable markets, and invest in capabilities to support growing products and markets created over a billion dollars in improved cash projections and contributed to the 38% increase in Sprint’s stock price over the next 18 months.
Following Sprint’s merger with Nextel, strategic planning was centralized in Corporate Strategy. Within a couple of years I was promoted to vice president of corporate strategy, working with Sprint’s leadership team to identify and pursue strategic opportunities and threats. One of those opportunities was in the prepaid wireless space. Primarily through a strategic acquisition and the launch of a disruptive offer we were able to nearly double our revenue in this sector and become the clear leader in prepaid.
Still, the company as a whole was struggling. I had seen a handful of CEOs rotate through the company, some of whom were more open to strategic perspectives than others. I was feeling burnt out and was praying to God for direction. He helped me see the incredible path He’d taken me on. How had a geeky electrical engineering grad come to be strategy leader for a Fortune 100 company? The short answer was the grace of God, but the longer answer was the startup experiences He had provided.
When Gordon, David and I quit LDDS and started Digital Frontiers, I learned that building a successful technology company wasn’t just about designing graceful algorithms and writing beautiful code. There were these things called “customers” and there was this concept of “finance” and both mattered… a lot. I went from being deep in a few things to having a very broad understanding of all aspects of running a successful company.
Combining the structure and discipline I’d learned as an engineer with the vision and insight God had gifted me with and the personal connection with all aspects of running a business that entrepreneurship provides had prepared me to be a consultative strategic leader, able to guide operational leaders in making the decisions critical to long term success and value creation in their businesses.
I felt called to help young Christians get startup experience themselves to best prepare them for whatever God would have for them. So when my boss called to tell me that my position was being eliminated (along with many others) and I was being laid off, I saw it as a gift from God.
I formed SDG Strategy for consulting work and became Entrepreneur in Residence at Oklahoma Christian University in Oklahoma City. While there I had the opportunity to earn an MBA and was blessed to work closely with students, young alums, faculty, and staff on new business ideas. I mentored business plan teams that won back-to-back statewide competitions and helped launch two startup businesses.
Altimeter Software provided a Software-as-a-Service solution for universities to get students actively engaged in campus life, and especially at Christian universities, in their own spiritual development. VisuALS Technology Solutions provided a device to enable patients who had lost the ability to communicate to literally speak with their eyes. Both companies were very rewarding for all involved and met the goal God had given me of providing young Christians with startup experiences, but neither business reached a sustainable level of growth.
My deep discussions with a potential strategic acquirer of Altimeter helped me learn some key lessons in the factors that challenge a company’s valuation or may even make it unsellable. We shut down both businesses gracefully not long after my EIR contract was up and we had moved back to Kansas City.
Since 2019, SDG Strategy has been serving a variety of different types of businesses through strategic consulting. One of the most rewarding engagements has been helping the owner of a successful commercial construction company prepare for his retirement. His goals included providing for his family, rewarding the people who had helped him build the company, and maintaining the Christ-centered culture of the business for generations to come. Based on that experience, I felt led to earn the Certified Exit Planning Advisor designation and focus my work on similarly helping other business owners prepare for their own exits.
It’s amazing to me to see how God has prepared me for this work.
How I Create Value
God has given me an ear to be a trusted counselor to business owners. I listen well. I understand the challenges that business owners face as well as their dreams and ambitions. I know what it’s like when you and your business are so intertwined that it’s hard to see life beyond for either yourself or the business.
But He has also given me an eye to see what is possible. He has given me a voice to ask the right questions, the hard questions. To speak wisdom from experience and knowledge. To guide the business owner towards a future that is rewarding and freeing. And He has given me the opportunity to be at the table as businesses are bought and sold, both on the buying side and on the selling side, with many different deal structures.
God has given me a brain that is structured and efficiency minded so that I can identify the steps necessary to improve the business and prepare it for the future. He has given me experience working across organizations to drive projects and processes that create value and improve the health of the business. He has wired me to be able to communicate clearly and effectively so that everyone understands what needs to happen and why, and what we need to do to make it happen.
Most of all, God has given me a servant’s heart. None of this is about me. I want to apply the gifts God has given me to help others be successful and to bring Him glory.
I do hope to be able to serve and help you and your business! Let me know if you’d like to discuss any of this further. Thank you!
