My Career Path » Entrepreneurial Ventures

Building Institutions, Not Just Businesses

Much of my entrepreneurship has grown out of the same question: How can we help complex institutions make better, more informed decisions? As a long-time academic leader at institutions ranging from regional comprehensives to large multi-campus Research I universities, I saw first-hand how much potential was locked away in disconnected data, siloed expertise, and ad-hoc processes. That experience led directly to:

G² Ed Consulting

My higher-education consulting practice focused on translating research, data, and organizational theory into operational effectiveness and sustainable change.

The HELLO Community

The Higher Education Leadership Learning Online Community – a not-for-profit, no-cost global learning community for higher-ed leaders that I founded and built to thousands of members, offering shared resources, mentoring, and decision-support tools.

Both are entrepreneurial efforts in the broad sense: they design and deliver new “infrastructure” for leadership, collaboration, and institutional learning across the sector.

KnowledgeWorkshop: A Software Company for Personal Knowledge Management

My most formal entrepreneurial venture was Learning Management Solutions, a small technology startup I founded to develop knowledge management and lifetime learning software.

At its core was KnowledgeWorkshop, a personal knowledge-management environment designed to help individuals:

• Capture information from diverse sources
• Map relationships between concepts, projects, and decisions
• Build a durable, searchable personal knowledge base over time

As founder and CEO, I:

• Led the product vision and information-architecture design
• Managed a software development team building the platform
• Raised over $250,000 in private funding to support development and early deployment
• Oversaw strategy, finance, customer relations, marketing, and support as we introduced the software to early adopters in education and professional practice.

KnowledgeWorkshop grew directly out of my work on concept mapping, decision support, and institutional knowledge—ideas that continue in my current work with Sentient, a knowledge-mapping and modelling environment for higher education.

Consumer Entrepreneurship: Good Night Sheet Tight™

Beyond software and consulting, I have also explored consumer-facing entrepreneurship through a venture branded Good Night Sheet Tight™. Drawing on the same habit of close observation and iterative improvement, this project applied my skills in:

• Brand creation and positioning
• E-commerce presence and user experience
• Translating an everyday problem into a concrete, marketable solution

The company sits at the “hands-on” end of my entrepreneurial spectrum—where you learn very quickly what resonates with real people and what doesn’t.

Protecting Ideas: Patents and Trademarks

Innovation is only useful if it can be sustained and shared. To that end, I’ve invested in protecting and formalizing my intellectual property:

• I have obtained a registered trademark associated with my entrepreneurial work and brand.
• I have filed two patent applications related to my approaches to knowledge management, decision support, and/or product design.

These steps are not about locking ideas away; they’re about creating a stable platform from which those ideas can be developed, licensed, and integrated into institutional practice with clarity and confidence.

Consulting as an Entrepreneurial Lab

My consulting practice functions as an ongoing innovation lab embedded within higher education:

• Designing new models for resource allocation, assessment, and strategy
• Prototyping concept-mapping and decision-support tools with client institutions
• Testing and refining frameworks from my book Metrics, Mapping, and Modelling for Masterful Management in Higher Education in real organizational settings
• Scaling successful approaches through the HELLO Community and Sentient knowledge-mapping environment

Each engagement generates new insights, use cases, and sometimes entirely new product ideas.

What I Bring to Entrepreneurial Partnerships

Across these ventures, a few themes keep repeating:

Systems thinking – seeing how governance, culture, data, and technology fit together

Tool-building mindset – I don’t just diagnose problems; I design and test tools to address them

Cross-sector fluency – experience in higher education, corporate R&D, and startups

Broad view of innovation – from personal knowledge management to institution-wide decision support

Whether the context is a university trying to reorganize for the future, a software product aimed at managing knowledge more intelligently, or a consumer venture built around a simple but nagging problem, my entrepreneurial work is about the same thing: making it easier for people and institutions to think clearly, act wisely, and evolve deliberately.