At the End of the Day

Brad and Mary, the co-owners of the Alternative Board, felt confident they would have no issue securing capital investment for their fledgling company.  Their business model was strong, and both had extensive experience in their respective consulting fields.

Much to their surprise, however, their initial attempts to attract funding were met with considerable resistance, and all for the same reason: the business partners and co-owners were married.

“A lot of people objected to our starting and running a company together,” Brad now remarks.  “I can see how it would be difficult for other couples, but Mary and I have a deep belief in the separation of church and state.  Business is business.  A huge transition takes place between when the lights turn off in the office and when they turn on at home at the end of the day.  When we disagree, we do so robustly, because it’s a conversation that must be carried out and that can’t follow us home.  We also agreed early on that, in the event of a disagreement, whoever has the best business argument will win, and we’ve managed to stay true to that.”

To other couples, determining the “best” business argument may seem too subjective to guide the two out of a quarrel, but both Brad and Mary are adept at putting their client’s needs first, and thereby trust each other to make the best choice for the company.  “More often than not, we balance each other and help turn each other’s weaknesses into strengths,” he says.  “She’s very risk-averse, while I’m risk assumptive, so she’s taught me to make calculated risks, while I help her take more chances.”

While others may have doubted the couple’s ability to cooperate, The Alternative Board West Fairfax-Alexandria—their second major consulting firm—is flourishing.  As a membership-based organization that provides advisory boards and strategic leadership coaching to business owners, Brad and his team specialize in promoting growth and success for their clients.

“The best way to explain what we do is through an analogy,” he says. “Imagine you’re a business owner trekking through the jungle, and you suddenly find yourself stuck in quicksand.  Your first reaction is to call your friends and family for help, but they respond, ‘Well, we told you not to do this in the first place, so good luck getting out.’  Then a business coach might walk by, and they say, ‘Do this and that, and you’ll find your way out,’ but that’s the extent of their involvement.  Finally, board members walk by, and when they see you in trouble, they jump in the quick sand to try and help.  You think, ‘Great, now we are all stuck,’ but they respond, ‘You know, we’ve been through this before.  We can all put our heads together and get out of it.’

“Our practice is truly focused on leveraging other business owners who understand at an intimate level the trials and tribulations of running a business,” he continues.  “Whether it’s a start-up company or a large corporation, the conversations are all the same; the only difference is the scale and complexity.  We use that dynamic to empower and enable other business owners to really and truly begin to flesh out how they carry their business and move it forward.”

The Alternative Board was officially launched in 2010 after Brad and Mary reformulated their consulting company when they realized they were drawn to helping other business owners advance their companies, as well as their lives.  “It gave us process and procedure to bring to our portfolios, as well as the freedom to augment the new concepts with the consulting experience we had gained during the previous decade,” he explains.

Today, The Alternative Board is based in Northern Virginia and currently advises 28 businesses and plans to add ten more in the next year.   When the company was formally launched in 2010, their portfolios were populated with businesses of all sizes; however, Brad and Mary are currently trying to focus on companies with between $2 and $85 million in revenue, and with a minimum of ten employees.  “We prefer mid-size to larger clients because the conversation tends to be more robust and more complex, with greater opportunities to work on things that are really meaningful to the business owner,” Brad explains.   “With larger businesses, the challenges become more multi-faceted, and that’s our specialty.”

When Brad puts boards together for clients, they tend to cap at eight members, since that size allows everyone to contribute and have their issues discussed.  The board will then meet on a monthly basis for a four-hour, highly structured and facilitated meeting.  Mary and Brad also offer an hour of executive coaching to the owner each month, which is where the focus often shifts to the company’s strategic plan and they have an opportunity to sort through the advice collected from the company’s advisory board meeting.  “The underlying component is the strategic planning process, but it has to be put into action,” Brad explains.  “This is where we are most actively engaged in order to help business owners accomplish their objectives.”

It comes as no surprise to Brad that he would have found a career in consulting because, after spending most of his formative years traveling around the world, he grew to understand and respect the unique nature of people as individuals through his exposure to so many different cultures.  He was born in Troy, New York, while his father was earning his Masters Degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute through the Navy.  After his father graduated, the family, along with Brad’s older half sister and younger brother, began moving continuously, so that they found themselves in a new place every two years, including Spain, Japan, Hawaii, California, Texas, and Virginia.

Brad recognized early on the benefits of being exposed to so many new cultures and forms of life, but his expanding worldly knowledge was shadowed by the harsh reality of bullying that followed him to each new school.  “I use to be a very small, timid guy, so when they inevitably came to rough me up at the start of a new school year, I’d try to hide from them,” he says.  “One day, though, in San Diego, something snapped in me.  Enough was enough, and then I became the bully.  I’d walk right up to the biggest kid in the class and pick the fight.”

As his own bullying worsened, Brad fell in with a dangerous crowd during his junior year of high school.  He hardly thought twice about the hardened teenager he became until one night, he and his friends roughed up some people in Georgetown.  “In that moment, I snapped again and realized I didn’t want to be this person anymore,” he says.  “It was my most shameful incident, and it bothers me even today.  In many ways, I think it drove me to be as dedicated as I am to helping the people around me advance within their own company or personal life.”

From that day on, Brad put his bullying ways behind him and instead focused on his studies, which he’d maintained good grades in, as well as focusing on golf.  When he was twelve years old, his father bought him a set of golf clubs, and the two would spend long afternoons playing together.  It allowed Brad quality time with his father while also giving him an escape from the bullying drama at school, which was echoed by unrest at home, where his parents’ marriage was slowly crumbling.  “I believe golf, more than anything else, exhibits life,” he comments.  “It’s managing disappointments and wins, and it’s such an accurate compass to how other people react.  If they are club throwers or cheats, that’s how they will behave in their daily life too.”

When Brad graduated in 1969, he chose the University of Texas for its strong business school and warm climate, as well as the distance it granted him from his home in Virginia, where his parents had recently divorced.  He came to college hoping to become a professional golf player, but quickly found many on his team dwarfed his talent, so he decided a more realistic path would be to focus on his degree.  He considered going into law, since an uncle he admired was a lawyer, but once he dug deeper into his classes, he found he was vastly more interested in business and finance.

During his time as an undergraduate, Brad started working part time at Zales Jewelers to pay for his tuition.  He enjoyed his work and found he was learning a great deal from the company, so he joined them full time after graduating in 1973 with a degree in business.  During his several years at Zales, he was frequently promoted, so that he ended his career with the company as a Director of Sales in Dallas, Texas.  “During that time, I learned more about different profit structures and how to really run a business than I could have picking up a PhD from Harvard,” he laughs.  “The guys I worked with were brilliant.  We had several layers of profit built in before the diamonds even hit the stores.  Every Saturday, the entire executive team would come in and review store purchase orders to ensure proper inventory mix predicated on regional needs.”

In 1979, Brad decided to leave the jewelry business, having had enough of the long hours and the company’s general aversion to the technologies that would have expedited their work.  He transitioned over to the University Computing Company, where the business was having trouble selling a complex software solution to banks.  “They brought me in for support to leverage my marketing experience and try to figure out why they weren’t getting traction on the solutions,” he says.  “When I came in, I didn’t try to learn the system from the ground up because I had no software experience.  Instead, I learned what value they were attempting to deliver, and through that, I found they were targeting the wrong customers.  They had been trying to sell it to the Chief Information Officers, when fundamentally it didn’t solve any of the problems directly associated with that role.  From there, we could see the real beneficiaries were the people running the retail and commercial banks.”

When Brad made that breakthrough for the software system, the product took off, which in turn led to his own success.  He became the top producer and salesman within his branch and spent eight lucrative years with the company, until he decided to step away during a company merger.  He’d enjoyed his years there, but what had especially spoken to him was the consulting side of his work, rather than the computing.  With that, Brad decided to join another computing company that was focused more heavily on the consulting side, so that as he gained more responsibility within his role, he also acquired more consulting firm clients.  “It was a huge mistake not to integrate all the various solutions available from the myriad number of acquisitions made over the years, because multiple sales representatives from different divisions of the same company were calling on the same decision maker at the targeted financial institution,” he explains.  “This created a burden on our client’s time and obfuscated the true value of the solution we offered.  To address this, a sort of gatekeeper role was created in order to identify mission critical issues that had an enterprise-wide impact for the bank, and match those issues to the various services and products that our company offered so that the decision makers could make a cleaner, more educated choice about the most effective approach to solving the problem.”

In 1998, Brad started dating Mary, who, at the time, was the Senior Vice President at Bank One, running a $1.5 billion student loan portfolio for the bank and serving as its senior education lobbyist on Capitol Hill.  The couple began sharing notes on each other’s profession, and Brad realized there was a huge marketing opportunity for a firm to offer complete service to banks with regards to student loans.  “I convinced Mary to put together a marketing organization and consulting firm that offered all these services to banks in the business who were not getting a lot of traction,” he says.  “We take care of the headache for them, give them all the gravy, and take a small percentage of that.”

The business model proved to be so successful for the couple that both left their jobs to fully engross themselves in their joint business, Strategic Resource Alliance, LLC.  Over the next decade, they grew the business and were enjoying their joint career, until two events left them with almost nothing.  The first was the government’s decision to exclude the private sector from participation in the federal student loan program, which the pair foresaw, while the second was the crash of the capital markets.  “Our big failure was strategic planning,” he admits.  “We thought we understood what was happening from a regulatory point of view, but no one could have foreseen the market’s collapse in 2008.  We failed to put in a contingency plan, which is something we now understand very well and bring to our clients.”

In the wake of the Alliance’s downfall, the couple decided to rebuild their consulting firm into a company that would reach more customers and have a strong enough foundation that they would be better prepared for future fluctuations in the market.  With that vision, their consulting firm was launched as The Alternative Board in 2010.

As Brad continued to move through his consulting career, several fundamental lessons about business have remained constant forces of direction when guiding his clients.  The first, and perhaps most pressing, is to hold on to the company’s creativity.  “As soon as a company becomes tactical, it gets in trouble, because it puts its head down and grinds out only what it knows best,” he explains.  “When that happens, they lose the creative and innovative edge that made them good in the first place.”

The second lesson he carries with him is to always put the needs of the customer first.  “There can be such a lack of humanity in so many different business scenarios, but that can be avoided if you always keep your client’s interests in front of your own.  When you do that, you’ll always win,” he says.  “If there’s a gray area about a right or wrong decision, we default back to our business’s fundamental values of keeping our client’s interest in front of our own, and inevitably we feel that we make the right decision.”

From a leadership standpoint, Brad has never been afraid to admit his weaknesses—a willingness that has ultimately made him a stronger leader.  “I’m extremely lucky to have Mary as my business partner, because we play off of each other in a very beneficial way,” he says.  “Most times, my style is to be very friendly and collaborative, but when the pressure is cranked up, I tend to go into a command and control role, which is a weakness.  Mary is more fluid, however, and more adept at staying consistent through times of high and low stress, so she becomes a very solid counterweight for me. “

At the end of the day, Brad recognizes that he and Mary work so well in their business as well as in their marriage because they fundamentally enjoy what they do, and they love doing it together.  “We have such a passion for helping our clients succeed that we often come home after a long day and discuss how to better our company over cocktails,” he says.  “In that relaxed environment, it’s not work anymore, because it’s fun for us.  We love to talk about our clients and celebrate one another’s success.  At the end of the day, I don’t think I could ask for much more than that.”

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