Dave brought us into the 21st century with his unique brand of HR consulting. We had such high turnover, losing good people to competitors left and right, hiring the wrong people, etc. He came in and showed us how to craft a total rewards package tied to a performance management system that actually works. And everyone had a say, which is novel. The big consulting firms talk about bottom-up change, but that usually means bringing in the lowest-ranking VPs, and their initiatives invariably fail. Dave walks the talk. He also taught us about structure and the importance of relationships and how to use a simple rules strategy to build relationships not destroy them. I mean, these policies are revamping the way we do business.

J.D. (Cap City)

When I first hired Dave as an executive coach, he naturally asked me about my business and what some of my pressing concerns were. I’d purchased a small company in Europe to augment our business in the US, but for 3 years the company produced nothing. It was a big sink hole, but I felt that we’d come this far and couldn’t quit now. Dave asked about our HR department and how they handled decision-making and counterbias training for execs and managers. Naturally, we had none of that stuff. Long story short, through Dave’s patient tutelage, we discovered that a collective sunk-cost fallacy was holding us locked in place. We should have divested of that company long before we did. Moreover, many of those same biases were breaking down relationships inside our US office and even between our company and our clients. We weren’t giving each other the constructive feedback we needed to overcome our biases. We judged each other but rarely listened to each other. I never knew HR–or human and social capital as we now refer to it–could be so powerful. A rising tide lifts all ships, they say. That’s what effective HR policies are supposed to do. Thanks!

C.R. (Rosenberg and Parker)

Dave touts a strategy of better sensemaking, which leads to both more and better options to explore for how we might do business differently in the future. Exploit what works, but continuously explore for new options, and then devise safe relevant experiments in the field and adjust decisions based on the feedback. Through Dave’s human capital / social capital coaching, we were better able to engage the staff, who then felt more empowered to float those experimental ideas up. In just one of our car washes, this amounted to a 10% increase in the number of cars we were pushing through on a daily basis. Just one simple experiment in just one of our 12K tunnels helped us reimagine our business model.

G.D. (Atlantic Street Capital)