I Didn't Start in HR.
I Started in the Wreckage.

25 years inside the moments most consultants only read about. Mergers that nearly imploded. Founders who lost their best people. Teams that stopped telling the truth. I've been the person in the room when culture was either going to save the business or sink it.

The Short Version

I spent 25 years inside Fortune 500 companies, private equity portfolio companies, and founder-led startups. Not as a consultant watching from the outside. As the person accountable for making culture work when everything was on fire.

I've built HR infrastructure from scratch for companies scaling from 20 to 150 people. I've led cultural integration for mergers where two companies became one on paper but nobody owned the people side. I've coached founders who were brilliant at building products but had never managed a single human being.

What I learned: most people problems aren't people problems. They're culture problems. And culture isn't your values poster or your mission statement. It's what happens when you leave the room.

What Makes Me Different

I'm not an HR generalist and I'm not a management consultant. I'm a culture crisis specialist. I work in the moment where things are breaking down and the founder or PE team needs someone who's been in that exact situation before.

I bring Hogan assessments, competency modeling, and real leadership diagnostics. Not personality quizzes. Not team-building exercises. The tools that private equity firms use to evaluate whether leadership teams can actually execute.

And I do it as a fractional CHRO, which means you get senior leadership without the full-time executive price tag.

Where I've Been

Fortune 500 Experience

25 years working inside large organizations navigating complex culture challenges including major restructuring, leadership transitions, and organizational transformation.

PE & M&A Integration

Led cultural integration for mergers and acquisitions where the people side was the make-or-break factor. 33-50% of all M&A failures are attributed to people problems.

Founder-Led Startups

Built HR infrastructure from the ground up for companies scaling past their founder's ability to manage people directly. From first hire to leadership team.

Hogan Certified

Certified in Hogan leadership assessments — the same tool PE firms and boards use to evaluate executive capability and derailment risk. Data, not guesses.

Korn Ferry Methodology

Trained in competency-based talent frameworks used by the world's leading organizations to build leadership pipelines that actually develop people.

IndeCollective Fellow

Member of IndeCollective, a community of top independent consultants and fractional executives building high-impact advisory practices.

What I Believe

These aren't corporate values. They're the things I've learned by watching what works and what doesn't.

The founder IS the culture.

Until you have about 150 people, your company's culture is a direct reflection of how the founder leads, communicates, hires, and handles conflict. Fix the founder's blind spots, and you fix the culture.

Culture isn't soft. It's strategic.

65% of VCs say bad management is the #1 startup killer. 47% of employees leave in Year 1 post-acquisition. Culture is the variable that determines whether the business succeeds or fails.

Drama is a symptom, not a diagnosis.

When founders say they have "drama" or "people problems," what they actually have is a culture that was never intentionally built. Fix the system and the drama resolves itself.

HR should make the founder's job smaller, not bigger.

If you're spending 40-60% of your time on people problems, that's not leadership. That's a missing infrastructure problem. Good HR gives you your time back.

Ready to Talk?

If something on this page resonated, let's have a conversation. No pitch, no pressure. Just an honest look at where your culture stands.

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Let's Talk

No pitch. No pressure. Just an honest conversation about where your culture stands.

Get In Touch

Email: info@unorthodoxhr.com

Based in: Kansas City, serving clients nationwide

Whether you're a founder wondering if your culture is holding you back, or a PE team mid-acquisition with people questions — I've been in that exact conversation hundreds of times.