I didn't take the conventional path.
My background is in geology, geochemistry, and remote sensing — which meant early in my career I was doing fieldwork. Going places most people don't have access to. Seeing things that don't happen in offices or fixed settings. That kind of exposure does something to how you think — it teaches you to look in the whitespace, connect complex ideas that don't seem related, and trust what you're putting together intuitively even before you can fully explain it.
Managing a NIST-accredited laboratory and working as an industrial hygienist sharpened that further. The most important skill I developed wasn't technical — it was knowing what questions to ask.
That mindset followed me everywhere after.
It started in the lab. Building systems, automating processes, finding ways to make complex data useful. That work didn't stay in the lab — it opened a door into technology and business that I've been walking through ever since.
Over the past 25 years I've worked both inside organizations as a leader and outside them as a consultant and advisor. I've aligned business and technology from the inside out — building startup-like initiatives within existing organizations, leading technology initiatives, architecting systems, and helping companies across industries connect the dots others missed.
The clients I've worked with include leading companies in their industries — ASSA ABLOY, Cedar Fair, Classic Firearms, Innospec, Speedway Motorsports, and Worx among them. Collectively I've helped generate over $1 billion in revenue for clients, built software that's still running — and still making money — more than a decade later, and driven operational efficiencies that freed organizations to grow.
But some of the most fulfilling work happened outside of client engagements — in businesses I built from scratch.
As a technology investment partner, Orbcord consults with and advises companies worldwide — identifying and leveraging technology investments to maximize ROI and helping clients achieve their goals through strategic innovation.
In 2017 I became a restaurateur as a principal in FTF Holdings. We survived a global pandemic, built a loyal following, and delivered year-over-year growth by doing the unglamorous work of showing up and taking care of people. That experience taught me more about resilience and leadership than most of my tech work ever did.
In 2014 I co-founded Navinsure, a web-based employee health benefits brokerage that created an online marketplace for benefits and insurance solutions. We simplified a genuinely complex process for employers and employees, maintained HIPAA compliance, and earned approval from the Department of Health and Human Services. Building in a heavily regulated space teaches you things you can't learn anywhere else.
I founded Total Event Media to solve a problem nobody had solved yet — giving competition event attendees a way to purchase photos and videos in real time, both on-site and online. It was a first-of-its-kind ecommerce platform that set a new standard for the event media industry. I built it because I saw the gap. That's usually how it starts.
"100% complete solutions — Chuck is amazing at thinking about a problem from all angles: technical, marketing, business, and administrative. His solutions are complete and thorough."
Ryan Currington
CTO | NextGear Growth
"Together we built one of the earlier web-based entities for health insurance rates. Most of the time it didn't feel like work because Chuck is so fun to be around, tremendously bright, and able to sequence another person's ideas so intuitively."
Chris Efthymiou
Founder | Navinsure
On the outside I was doing exactly what I was supposed to be doing. Building things, solving problems, generating results. The boxes were getting checked. Life was good.
But something was gnawing at me. The challenges stopped feeling like challenges. The raises kept coming — which, if I'm honest, made me complacent longer than I should have been. It wasn't a crisis — just a growing disconnect between what I was building externally and what I actually wanted internally.
I stayed in my head about it for longer than I'd like to admit. Tried to think my way through it the way I'd always solved everything else.
It didn't work.
I couldn't think my way out of a disconnect like that. I had to walk through it. And I didn't do it alone — I had people alongside me who made the difference. That experience changed what I thought was possible and eventually changed what I did with my time.
That led to co-founding Men Being Human — a space where men have real conversations about the things most of us were never taught to talk about. And to Evolve Inward, a broader ecosystem for the inner work that doesn't show up on a resume but changes everything.
I'm not a traditional coach. I'm definitely not a therapist. I'm someone who has spent decades solving complex problems — in labs, in corporations, in startups, even as a restaurateur — and who eventually had to turn that same rigorous attention toward the hardest problem of all: figuring out what I actually wanted and who I actually was beneath all the doing.
I have an unusual combination of analytical depth, entrepreneurial range, and hard-won personal experience. If you want to talk business, I can do that. Marketing and branding, been there. Career transitions, built a few. The inner work that makes all of it sustainable — that's what I'm most interested in now.
I don't have all the answers. But I've walked further down this road than most, twisted my ankle a few times, and I know where the holes are.
I'm here because finding the right people to walk with made all the difference — and I want to be that for someone else.