Clearly Agile, Inc.

In 2014, the Agile consulting market was full of generalists. Companies were buying training that had no connection to whether teams actually shipped product. Coaches showed up, ran ceremonies, and left. The work didn't stick.

I co-founded Clearly Agile on a different premise: combine training, coaching, and custom software development under one roof, so the same people who taught the framework would also have to live in it with the customer. No theory without delivery. No coaching without code.

We grew by hiring developers who could teach and trainers who could ship. The dual-track model (services plus training) meant we had predictable revenue from courses while the bigger consulting engagements built up. Fortune 500 clients came in waves: Disney, PwC, Nielsen, and a long list of regional enterprises. We trained thousands of professionals in Scrum, Kanban, and Scaled Agile.

By year four we were on the Inc. 5000 in the top 500 fastest-growing companies, ranked in the top 25 of Tampa Bay's fastest-growing private companies, and made the Vet100 list of fastest-growing veteran-owned companies in the U.S.

When in-person training collapsed in March 2020, we rebuilt the entire delivery model for remote inside of six weeks. New facilitation patterns, new tooling, new pricing for virtual cohorts. Consulting moved fully remote at the same time. Revenue stayed flat through 2020 while many competitors lost the year.

I implemented EOS (Entrepreneurial Operating System) during that period to clean up our operating cadence (rocks, scorecards, weekly L10s) and got the partnership aligned on what we were building toward.

In 2019 I sold 50% of the company to a partner who took on the day-to-day operational role, freeing me up for fractional work, product building, and training. I remain active as Chief Agile Officer and a Certified Scrum Trainer. The company continues to serve enterprise clients and certify thousands of practitioners every year.

The dual-track model was the bet that worked. Anyone can teach theory. Very few firms can teach and then prove it on production code with the same customer. That stickiness is what got us our renewals and the kind of word-of-mouth that put us on the Inc. 5000.

The other lesson was operational: founders who can't separate the work from the operations of the work eventually become the ceiling. EOS, the partnership restructure, and stepping out of daily ops were the moves that unlocked everything I've been able to build since.