Two companies. Two exits.
One repeatable playybook.

Alongside Management

I didn't start Alongside Management — I bought it. When I joined in 2000, it was a small sales training firm based in Richmond, Virginia, with three employees and more than twenty offerings. The first thing we did was simplify. Applying the Hedgehog Concept from Good to Great, we cut everything down to the two programs we could genuinely be best in the world at.

Then we stopped trying to grow by adding people. Instead, we licensed our content to multinational companies and certified their internal trainers to deliver our programs. Revenue doubled — quickly. Most of it was recurring. Margins ran around 90%. We eventually expanded into 10 languages and built a business that didn't require the owners to show up for it to run.

I bought out my partner in 2007 and sold the company eight years later to a customer — at 5X what I originally paid. Not because of revenue growth alone. Because of what the licensing and certification programs had built: a scalable, defensible, owner-independent asset.

Yukon Learning

I started Yukon Learning in 2008 — yes, directly into the financial crisis. The first two years were a grind. But we survived, and made a pivotal acquisition: a small company with an existing relationship with Articulate, then an emerging player in the e-learning space.

We became Articulate's strategic training partner, delivering hands-on workshops for their users worldwide. And again, I applied the same model. We built a licensing and certification program around our Articulate curriculum and went looking for global partners. The first was in the UK. The second in Australia. Then another. Then another.

By the time I exited in 2019, Yukon had certified training partners in 12 countries, all delivering our licensed material — faithfully, consistently, and without us in the room. The company is still going strong today, recognized as an industry leader in the e-Learning space.