t'order America

t'order is an innovative technology solution designed for the restaurant industry to enhance the customer experience by enabling seamless digital menu browsing and order placement.

Chief Executive Officer

LeadershipCures

A B2B professional services/global advisory firm specializing in capital-efficient growth strategies and operational effectiveness. We work with investors, owners, and executives to unlock growth potential and rapidly improve net profit in businesses with revenues ranging from of $10 to $250 million.

Our team of F-Chief Strategy Officers, F-Chief Operating Officers, and Operating Advisors partner with executive leadership across multiple teams (Marketing, Sales, Operations, Finance, People, IT/Tech, Delivery, Account Management) to identify strategic initiatives and improve operational effectiveness/efficiency, unlocking scalable expansion.

Implement process enhancements with executive leadership and subject matter experts to optimize operational effectiveness/efficiency and improve margins.

Lead change management initiatives focusing on execution accountability through clear objective and key performance indicators (KPIs).

Align revenue growth with the internal operations necessary to support current and future growth objectives.

Catalyte

Catalyte is an AI-enabled workforce company. Its proprietary technology uses 500+ data points to discover and develop high-potential talent. As a result, Catalyte offers employers tenacious, high-performing talent that increases productivity, quality and diversity metrics while reducing the total cost of talent. By redefining hiring and elevating ability over resumes, Catalyte transforms individuals, companies and communities.

Advisor

Deputy

Shareholder

A global B2B SaaS workforce management technology used in 100+ countries and loved by 1.4 million shift workers.

Build out GTM and Operations infrastructure for rapid growth in US market. Led operational efficiency and synergy across marketing, sales, operations, delivery, implementations, finance, account management, HR, Legal and developed strategic partnerships with industry leaders like Apple and ADP. 

Hired the leaders, established our operating model, developed KPIs, reporting, processes, procedures and technologies to support scale. 

10x Growth Over $100m in Series A & B funding.

President

Force Management

A B2B professional services firm that develops elite sales teams and tomorrow’s revenue leaders by delivering cross-functional alignment, customized programs and revenue acceleration platforms to drive revenue.

Advised executive teams on development of go-to-market strategies & value selling messaging, enhancing sales and marketing effectiveness.

Directed change management initiatives, facilitating alignment among cross-functional teams for cohesive value messaging and operational execution.

Coached senior leaders on effective leadership techniques to implement transformative strategies and embed transformational vision within company culture.

Advisor to C-Suite Leadership

MarketSource Inc.

A B2B services firm that designs and operationalizes sales and customer experience solutions that are purpose-built and tech-enabled to deliver measurable improvements in business outcomes.

Led strategic planning, corporate innovation, and operations  for a $300+ million B2B Professional Services organization.

Drove business transformation and change efforts for overall high-volume Talent Acquisition (Recruiting) business function (15k hires/year)

Collaborated with executive leadership team to implement strategic initiatives that substantially contributed to organizational growth from $75 million to $300 million.

Vice President, Strategy & Operations

Senior Executive managing complex client relationships, P&L owner, responsible for strategy and operational performance of 3,000 employee sales and marketing outsourcing business, including client services (operations), recruiting, and innovation services groups. 

Grew the business from $52 to $64 million in ARR (23% increase).

Vice President, Operations

Led operations and delivery of sales and marketing services, implementing customer focused sales discipline and processes to help leading electronics manufacture sell more, faster while deliver superior client value and 20:1 ROI.

Scaled the team from 900 to 1,800+ sales and marketing professionals representing multi-billion retail sales channel with 95% - 150% quota attainment.

Grew the business from $17 million to $32 million in ARR (88% increase).

Executive Director, Client Services

Developed and launched innovative field-based sales and marketing program for world's leading telecom company across North America in top 25 US Markets with a team of 125 people. 

Developed the strategy and operating model, hired the Management Team and Field Reps, established KPIs, variable compensation plans, performance management system. 

Launched and grew the service from $0 to $10 million in less than 12 months.

Director of Client Services

Home Depot, Inc.

Directed strategic change initiatives across operational, sales, and marketing disciplines under executive sponsorship, enhancing organizational effectiveness and improving market share position by 320 BP in a $1.1 billion category.

Developed a leadership training program in conjunction with company Presidents, resulting in strengthened leadership talent pipeline.

Leadership Program

Candiate for Governor

• Personally recruited by the sitting Attorney General to lead political operations for his campaign for Governor in Virginia. 
• Hired staff, managed budgets, developed campaign strategy and executed operations. 
• Led and orchestrated activities of teams of hundred of paid political operatives and volunteers throughout the Commonwealth. 
• Record fundraising set for a Republican candidate for Governor.

Campaign Manager

Wild River Outfitters Inc

• Start up and launch of an outdoor adventure sports company. 
• Developed new revenue streams by way of new products and services. 
• Extended the retail business into services: guide services for half day, full day, multi-day excursions and also extended the business with new revenue streams by launching instruction services to teach the sport of kayaking. 
• Developed innovative partnership with global adventure travel provider to offer international trips around the world. Profitable in year one and scaled to a team of 45 people.

Managing Director

I help CEOs unlock growth, transform companies, and scale rapidly | CEO | CSO | COO ✨ Book a Free Strategy Session ⬇️

As a growth-driven executive, I thrive on helping businesses overcome challenges, solving big problems and driving meaningful change.

Understanding what's holding you back (in life and in business) is the key to getting a big push forward and unlocking breakthrough results in growth. Using a proven process and method, I can help your business find your limit to growth, optimize for it, collaborate around it, and uplift your business performance to get to the next level of growth.

While not all change is an improvement, all improvement requires change. I thrive collaboratively working with executive leadership teams to develop and execute strategic initiatives, leading high-performing teams through change & transforming companies to get to the next level of growth - rooted in driving operational excellence, delivering outstanding client experiences and accelerating net profit.

Proven track record driving revenue growth (Full P&L Ownership):

✅ Built & launched new services group from scratch:  $0  -> $10 million (<1 year)
✅ Lead B2B Professional Services team through high growth:  $17  -> $32 million (in one year)
✅ Expanded B2B Services Division: $52 -> $64 million
✅ Scaled a B2B SaaS Tech company: 8k -> 80k customers (10x growth)
✅ Re-engineered & Implemented new Operating Model: 20% revenue improvement (in 60 days)

Specialties:  Building Operational Excellence, Strategy Development & Initiative Leadership, Business Innovation, Value Proposition, Leadership and People Development, Change Management, Project Management (PMO), Rapid Growth/Scaling Strategy and Execution, SaaS growth, Client/Customer Success, B2B Services, Problem Solving, Analysis, Theory of Constraints (TOC) Practitioner

Jason Walker

Avant Executive Search & Talent Advisory

Sonia Prais, Laurie Ryan, and I co-founded Avant Executive Search in 2020, and let's face it, if you were going to just dive in and try to shake things up, that was a great year to do it! It's been an absolute blast and I love my team, what we do, and who we do it for. The growth we've achieved has been phenomenal and we cannot thank all the early clients and advisors that believed in us and played a huge role in getting us launched. A big thank you also goes to our employees and partners that took a leap of faith and trusted us with the next stage of their career journey, we couldn't have delivered for the 30+ global clients we've partnered with without each of you!

Here's the official skinny:

Avant is a female-owned, retained executive search firm and talent consultancy servicing private equity, fashion, retail, technology, and hospitality brands in the U.S., Europe, and Asia-Pacific.

One of the fastest growing firms in the search industry, we were born from one simple philosophy: Ego is the enemy of great work.

Reach out to me anytime to learn more about how we can help your firm acquire executive talent, diversify the team, gain real-time insight into compensation trends and plan for future growth.

Korn Ferry

After consulting on strategy and partnerships for 4 years I joined Korn Ferry in 2017 in a shift to executive search and organizational consulting. I had gotten to know KF as a candidate back in 2010 when Clearwire was a hot name that they wanted to recruit leadership talent out of. I kept in touch over the next few years and ended up joining the firm when an opening to lead the technology sector for the Professional Search business came up in 2017. We achieved almost 40% growth in the 18 months after I came on and I hired some fantastic people who are still doing well there. 

Korn Ferry was a great transitional learning experience and I discovered that my years of operating experience were invaluable in terms of relating to clients, candidates and unique business challenges in a way that you just can't if you haven't managed at scale on the client side.

Sector Leader, North American Technology Market

ChannelPeak

Having worked with big brands and customer acquisition agencies for 15 years I decided to leverage the knowledge and relationships I'd acquired to found ChannelPeak. 

Our primary focus was helping companies expand distribution through new partnerships but we got to do some interesting stuff that was pretty far out of my wheelhouse at the time such as help develop a cosmeceutical line and source an entire catalog of home products for a foreign multi-level marketing firm. We also helped create new multi-channel platforms for customer acquisition firms and assist in M&A analysis between them.

Founder and Principal

Clearwire

This is pretty amazing in retrospect. I inherited a team of about 50 people in 4 markets that we grew to over 600 people in 53 markets in about 18 months for what's still one of the most the most heavily funded startups in US history. In 2009-10 I did hundreds of phone and in-person interviews from Boston to Austin and everywhere in between to staff up from zero and get each market to a successful launch. That experience was one that helped me transition quickly into talent acquisition.

Having all-channel responsibility across so many markets would still rank as the toughest but most valuable executive experience I've ever had. You definitely learn to prioritize quickly or risk getting too far behind to be able implement and execute strategy in time to be effective. 

My team was even able to create and execute a plan to pivot the retail business from post-paid to pre-paid in 2011 which improved cash-flow by over $100M annually and ended up being a major factor in our final purchase price improving by almost 50% from Sprint's initial offer to acquire us. But by far the coolest, most rewarding thing from this experience is seeing all the amazing success that people on my teams have had the last 7 years. These were some LONG, crazy hard days but ones I'll always remember as some of the most fun in my career.

Senior Vice President of Sales (now part of T-Mobile)

AT&T

Such a great place to start my career, I still appreciate the effort and investment that BellSouth put into developing me. Nowhere since then has close to matching that. Uber-conservative, plodding culture, but diplomatically navigating old bell-co bureaucracy to create wildly successful new channels here was what landed me my next gig. 

Promoted 5 times in 8 years, winning Pinnacle Club Awards 4 times and being selected for executive leadership development in 2004.

Regional Sales Manager, Lead Staff Manager, Distribution Channel Manager

My career successes, even before I pivoted into Executive Search & Human Capital Advisory, were all enabled by trying to better understand people and what excites them, scares them, and inspires them, to ultimately do my best to help them get where they want to go. It's been a lifelong passion for me and it is something I keep front and center in everything I do. No matter the business relationship, it all starts with building enough trust to get people to open up about what their most ambitious dreams are, and then working back to how achieving our common, near-term business objectives can support their journey towards those dreams. And sometimes there's not much of a path to connect those things, but the foundation to us all getting on the track we want to be on is that process of honest discovery. 

So it seems only natural that I would find my way into helping clients attract, develop, and retain great people. Getting to do that while having the opportunity to also do those things for my own people inside my own firm is the most rewarding thing I have experienced in my career.

David  Gray Barnette

I got asked this week what my motivation for starting my own firm was and what would it take for me to consider going back to a bigger one. 

I've been asked this before but lately I've come to a deeper realization about the why behind my thinking on it. My time as an entrepreneur is approaching 40% of my career, but if I look back into my time in an F100, then one of the most funded startups in US history, and finally a major search firm, I realize that 2/3 of that was building things that weren't there before, taking ideas from a conversation, to a white board, to a model, to making money (except at the last stop and that one never felt quite right as a result). 

And I can say hands down that building inside the enterprise is harder than in your own firm or a startup because you spend more time managing internal politics than you do optimizing, learning, and executing (seriously startups, don't sleep on folks that built a new line or business unit in huge companies, they have valuable skills for you). 

Your own venture is a much different set of challenges, first off, it's YOUR money going into it, and the pain of learning takes on a whole new meaning. And in the end, I've come to understand that it's this total ownership and accountability that drives me harder than any incentive plan that someone else hands me (and that I was able to successfully create this dynamic for myself as an employee even if I didn't fully realize my why  back then). 

When I'm controlling client outcomes to the extent I do here, and charting who we are and where we want to go, I'm just selling better, period. And that's what we want all of our Partners to feel too - purpose, ownership, autonomy - that there are no politics, no rigid, inefficient structures or systems, or decisions from leaders they barely know holding them back.

So as I see the labor market evolve and so many executives trying to navigate the fork in the road between entrepreneurship and dwindling FTE options, I'd say that the best thing you can do is look at your total arc and find the desires inside that pushed you the furthest. If you really like dropping into an established momentum and cadence, refining, and optimizing, even turning around what's already there more than a blank page, FTE is probably the answer. 

And there's nothing wrong with either path, it just needs to align to what will drive you the farthest. 

Oh, and I think my answer is pretty clear now. 

#executivesearch #entrepreneurship #employment

We deliver top global talent to clients in Private Equity & Venture Capital, Retail, Fashion, Hospitality, & Technology

A lot of portfolio companies spend their first year stinking up the joint. Integration noise and the shift to modified GTM and Operational plans get a lot of the blame, but at the end of the day talent is the biggest driver. 

Here’s what we hear a lot from various stakeholders: 

1. Talent is treated less like an asset and more like a cost. The PM team focuses on growth levers, operations, M&A rhythm, and while people planning has been dressed up a lot lately (these plans sound freaking amazing at conferences) a lot of folks still feel like it's an afterthought. And whether that perception is right or wrong, it kinda sends a message to the organization that you’re transactional, replaceable, and not strategic.

2. Handoff fatigue throughout the company from new leaders that people feel are disconnected, even aloof, as in "they're just here to talk to our new owners, they don't give a $#%& about us". In any ownership transition there's a crippling amount of uncertainty top to bottom. We see almost all of the focus on technical skill when firms are looking for new portfolio leadership, and there's just this massive gap in considering the softer skills needed to listen and reassure the middle and lower layers, even the 1-downs and critical executive holdovers, to help alleviate friction and retain key people through the first year. 

3. Talent planning is too shallow. Sure, the c-suite should get a lot of the attention...but not all of it. The #valuecreation rubber usually meets the road in the middle between Manager-Director-VP. These are the folks that have to translate new strategy, from new executives, quickly and effectively for the company to even begin to have a chance to meet plan. Spending some extra time evaluating the incumbents at these levels, and doing some market mapping and bench building for replacements if needed, early, is absolutely critical. 

If you’re heading into a new investment, or you’re in portfolio now and feel the first year slipping, these are 3 key things to look at closely. Building talent & leadership playbooks that accelerate the win curve is what we do, reach out and Avant Executive Search & Talent Advisory can help. 

#privateequity #talent

If most CMOs looked at the job specs their companies put out, they'd lose it. These documents create millions of brand impressions a year, yet they look like they were stitched together by ChatGPT-1 and an unpaid intern.

We see it every day:

-Responsibilities mistaken for requirements
-Requirements mistaken for responsibilities
-Typos galore
-Stale, generic employer-brand copy
-Low-res logos that look like they need a shave
-Layouts that scream “designed by someone who normally lives in Excel”

Job specs should pull talent in. Most push talent away.

And the fascinating part? The dysfunction varies by company type so here's some advice for each: 

#Startups / #VC
Founders are brilliant at many things, but let’s be honest - they’re not HR pros or brand storytellers. So candidates end up reading job specs that unintentionally telegraph chaos, risk, and “we’re making this up as we go.”

A few hours with a fractional leader or a real employer-brand expert can change the entire narrative of your company before you’ve even had your first call with a candidate.

#PrivateEquity
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: you say talent drives value creation, but you invest 99% of your attention in metrics dashboards instead of the optics that attract actual talent. Synergy targets, EBITDA bridges, working capital optimization—yes, essential. 

But none of it matters if the leaders you want take one look at your job specs and think, “Yeah…this feels like a churn-and-burn kind of deal.”  Senior candidates scrutinize PE-backed companies harder than anyone. Your employer brand should calm nerves, not spike them.

#Publics
The problem is structural: silos, approvals, layers. The people who could fix your job specs can’t even see them, and the people who can see them often don’t have the context or skill to make them compelling. One small process change - actual brand oversight - would transform how talent perceives you.

At Avant Executive Search & Talent Advisory, we’re borderline obsessive about this stuff. Published authors, creative agency veterans, and search pros who refuse to let bad optics slide (Laurie Ryan and Kristin Fry, I’m talking about you two in particular) are always casting a critical eye towards the little details. Everything we send - reports, decks, job specs - gets treated like a brand-defining asset. Because it is.

If your job specs (or any part of your #talentacquisition experience) are sending the wrong signals, we can fix that fast - and the impact on candidate quality is immediate.

Private equity wants 2026 results with 2006 hiring filters. Growth is the engine, but we’re still hiring for cost cops.
 
So many of the leadership searches we see are still built around the same old questions....SG&A reduction...expanded margins...cost out playbooks...

Then there's the cognitive assessments that rule out the most creative GTM talent over how fast they can solve math problems.  And the prestige bias that seems to forever haunt the sector where Ivy league degrees and early career blue chip consulting stints get added as talent filters where no one can attribute any tangible benefit to them that justifies ruling out a proven rainmaker or brand building wizard that went to North Dakota State and started their career selling from an end cap inside of a WalMart. 

So real growth operators — the ones who can redesign GTM, rebuild pricing, launch adjacencies, and accelerate revenue velocity — too often get filtered out.

And value creation stalls because the system keeps producing “cost cutters” when the thesis requires a “growth architect.”

Let’s call it what it is:

A lot of PE firms have a 2026 investment thesis and a 2006 hiring model.

If you want real upside:
 
-Start hiring builders, not just “fixers.”
-Start assessing growth intuition, not just operational track records.
-Start valuing commercial creativity as much as spreadsheet discipline.

The firms that evolve their talent lens fastest are going to own the next decade of returns.

#PrivateEquity #ValueCreation #ExecutiveHiring #Leadership #GrowthOperators #CommercialExcellence #PEPortfolioLeadership

"On the edge of this Midwestern cow town sit huge buildings with no windows, either vacant, half built, or barely used - monuments to what had been the grandiose promise of a renewed local economy, but also to the age old tale of the folly of men."

You can already imagine a documentary opening this way a decade from now about data centers in the AI infrastructure bubble. 

You've no doubt heard the #AI bubble compared to the #dotcombust by now. 

But wait until you see what it's got in common with the #GreatRecession: Special Purpose Vehicles (#SPVs) aka off-balance sheet financing. A LOT of it with A LOT more on the way. 

Historically, SPVs have been criticized for their lack of transparency, as simply a way to borrow a lot of money without it showing up on your balance sheet. Thus the phrase "control without consolidation" has been used to accurately sum them up. 

#Meta's recent $30B SPV (with a 10% equity component) is the one that seems to have attracted a bit of a spotlight this past week, but it's not the first and has no doubt kicked off an SPV arms race across big tech. With #McKinsey estimating that AI infrastructure build will top out around $7.6T by 2030, coupled with only one of those T's of CAPEX having been spent so far, it's easy to see how big (and eventually bad) this type of financing could turn out. 

It's the sort of financial engineering that creates an accelerating incentive loop, in this case between investors, insurers, and big tech, to keep borrowing in the least transparent way possible while inflating demand forecasts through unsustainably trading with one another, and covering up fatal indicators until there's no way left to hide them - and then the blow up trickles all the way down to the contractors, the local businesses that expanded in anticipation, the retail investors - sure the institutional guys and their high net worth clients will get hit too. But hit does not equal devastated and it's that latter fate that will fall on the former group. 

If awareness is half the battle, then maybe more people will keep a closer eye on how and from where the money for the AI build is coming since we've seen not that long ago how SPVs can lead us to bad places. The narrative then was "housing never falls" while this one is "AI demand is infinite", and the leverage multiples (so far) are smaller on AI, with private credit and sovereign wealth set to take an outsized role this time instead of big banks and hedge funds. But money is still money, and when a lot of it gets burned up we all feel it, regardless of who placed the bets.

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Jason Walker

David Gray Barnette

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