I have been picky in my career choices, which has allowed me to work across several industries and in lots of different organizational functions. Before college, I was already an entrepreneur and coder. In the not-for-profit world I was an individual contributor, then team leader. In management consulting, I built and led teams that delivered training and organizational development consulting projects. (I also delivered Lominger certification courses for Lominger Limited.) My first Fortune 500 role was as the global head of OD and training. My first tech startup experience had me coding software, supporting sales, and managing implementation. In hospitality, I managed training, quality assurance, and the members of the future leaders program - before creating the business change management function. I built a customer experience team for a mortgage finance company before being promoted into the parent company. As a senior executive in the investment management firm, I was the head of training and human resources. Then I led Marketing and Communications. I built the digital innovation team as part of my continued focus on the customer experience. My second stint at a tech startup put me in an advisory role. I implemented an HR function and managed contract approvals. I built out the processes and tools, then hired and managed Marketing, PR, and Sales. That leads us to my current roles: management consultant, tech start-up founder, and children's book/game publisher. I built each company from the ground up. All are boot-strapped and continuously evolving.

My success largely hinges on my approach. I always open with an assessment of the process, tech stack, and people. I collaborate with peers and direct reports to identify measurable and observable objectives. I facilitate planning, project management, and communications/change management with my team. We start addressing gaps as we execute. Then we measure, monitor, and report so that we can adjust until everyone and everything is working great.

After graduating from the University of Texas in Austin I moved to Miami, FL to pursue a PhD in Clinical Psychology from Nova Southeastern. I quickly realized that psychiatric hospitals were taking over the industry and I was not aligned with the ethics of their practices. I wanted to counsel at-risk youth and their families. Fortunately, before I had spent any money on actual classes I returned to The Woodlands, TX and became a social worker at a local United Way agency. I was a counselor for runaways, truants, and youth that were designated as at-risk of doing either from 1988 – 1998 at Montgomery County Youth Services . The grant that I worked under paid a consistent $18,500.00 per year every year. When MCYS built a challenge course I took advantage of the opportunity to learn a new skill. I had already been using non-physical activities to create awareness within families of their challenges with communication and collaboration. The challenge course was a giant version of such activities. Eventually, I became the Adventure Based Coordinator (responsible for camping trips, summer camp, and groups that visited the challenge course) and trained a lot of people how to facilitate collaboration-building activities and personal growth challenges (such as jumping off of a 30-foot tall pole toward a trapeze bar with only a rope tied to the back of your harness).

While at MCYS I was recognized for my ability to get fathers to constructively participate in counseling. Therefore, I was invited by the United Way to facilitate a particularly challenging (all male) fund allocation committee meeting that included members of companies that competed in the same industries. Once I was able to get everyone to set their professional differences aside, we made quick progress. Some of the members of that committee then hired me to come to their offices and facilitate challenging meetings that they were having. I started to leverage the non-physical collaboration and communication awareness activities at the start of each meeting, which resulted in faster results and referrals to new business. To supplement my social work income I started my own company, Ulmer and Associates. Through this entity I published my original corporate training activities (and those that I used in group counseling) in Facilitating Interpersonal Skills-Based Training Groups, Facilitating Success: Activities to Build a Team, Initiative Sticks, Facilitating Corporate Solutions and Play, Play, Play, spoke at several national and international conferences each year, and formally studied ‘training’. I used a traditional instructional design model during the three years (02/92-02/95) that Ulmer and Associates existed. During this time I also became certified in several personality and personal preference assessments that I used during coaching sessions and when training company leaders (e.g. MBTI, FIRO-B, In-Q, I-Opt, Strong Interest Inventory, customized instruments built with ODTools software, org effectiveness assessments, climate surveys, and 360° assessments).

MCYS could not pay me more than the grant allowed, but I was incentivized to bring corporate clients to the agency’s challenge course. The companies would pay MCYS for the use of the course, which helped me double my income and raised much needed money at a time when the agency was required to find matching funds for several grants. These corporate groups attracted the attention of a start-up company called Performa Solutions . I joined Performa when they were only weeks old. I had a lot of vacation time and I worked a lot of weekends at MCYS so I had plenty of time to devote to helping Performa create marketing and sales materials, write proposals and contracts, and to design collaboration-building and leadership development programs for clients. I also trained all of their contract staff in my facilitation style and on the safe use of the challenge course. As the company grew (and I tired of working 7 days per week) I finally joined Performa full time and left MCYS. To be honest, I was also over-extending myself by authoring several articles for HR.com, PIOP.net, TERABULL, Houston ODNet, and The Facilitator newsletters. My work was featured in Meetings and Conventions Magazine (Dec. 1998) and McGraw-Hill's 2000 Training and Performance Sourcebook. I wrote three chapters for Lominger's T7 Team Architect resource manual and a highly regarded challenge course program facilitation and safety manual. I published five books during these years, three of which are still available: Facilitating Interpersonal Skills-Based Training Groups, Facilitating Corporate Solutions, and Play Play Play (games you never played before because I just made them up).

I was with Performa Solutions from February 1995 to November 2000. I had expanded my skills and knowledge of training to include the best practices of leadership development, including becoming certified in all of Lominger’s Leadership Architect tools (the leadership competency model, 360-degree assessment software, corporate culture assessment, high potential assessment, team development assessment, etc.). Always seeking a new challenge I also started to study Organizational Development and Industrial/Organizational Psychology. I was also involved in a number of trade groups, which kept me very busy. I was very active with a listserv for ASTD and spoke at several national conferences. I was the newsletter editor for Houston OD Network. The Professional I/O Psych Network recognized me as a Top I/O Psychologist for my contributions to evaluating new assessments and leadership competency models.I became a very active member of the International Society for Performance Improvement, speaking at their international conferences each year. I published a popular performance improvement model and found myself training other OD practitioners how to identify the root cause of problems and then how to identify and implement the most effective solution (which was rarely training). This is when I was invited to be one of the first recipients of the new Certified Performance Technologist by ISPI. I was also one of the first recipients of the CPLP - Certified Professional in Learning and Performance by ASTD, the American Society of Training and Development. Then I became one of ASTD’s trainers for this certification (the organizational development sections).

Performa’s clients hired me to design and lead organizational analysis and design, teambuilding workshops, culture/climate and employee surveys, business process re-engineering, change management strategies, performance and process improvement interventions, strategic planning offsite, performance management systems, employee and leadership development classes, high potential assessment and development plans, supervisor and manager training, mentoring and coaching programs, Lominger competency-based HR system conversions, and executive development programs. Our key client groups included hospitality (Hyatt, Woodlands Resort & Conference Center, The Houstonian, Moody Gardens, Grand Casino Coushatta), retail (Kroger, Fiesta Mart, HEB), and oil & gas and chemicals (Shell, Exxon Mobil, Williams/Transco, BP Amoco, Texaco). My favorite executive development program was a partnership with the University of Houston that was a very robust, action-learning executive MBA that worked on actual business issues during each class, the Shell Leadership Development Program or SLDP. I was able to partner with top leadership development gurus on many projects, including university professors who encouraged me to focus my personal studies by going back to school and earning my PhD in industrial/organizational psychology. They steered me toward an affordable online program with Columbus University in Metarie, LA. Columbus got in trouble with the state just as I finished my self-paced program and doctoral thesis. A friend had just joined a Concordia College and University campus in the Caribbean and was able to get the professors there to allow me to transfer my work. I successfully defended my meta-analysis of nine major studies on critical leadership competence, but that campus had not earned accreditation. The studies and research had served their purpose and provided a richer foundation for developing and testing my theories, but because I did it only for me and because doctoral degrees often cause people to view someone in a negative light, I do not advertise the accomplishment. In 2000 I also helped Performa create a new company, Performa Consulting, which attracted the attention of a recently merged Pennzoil-Quaker State Company.

Having consulted with many larger companies, I was certainly not interested in being a cog in one of those machines, but Pennzoil-Quaker State made an offer that I could not refuse. The challenge was exciting: help this 120+ year old lubrication company become a profitable automotive consumer products company that would be attractive to a potential suitor that needed the brand-name products. As the Manager of Learning & Performance I built and managed a small corporate Organizational Development and Training team with a budget of $2.4MM. I taught my three direct reports how to assess knowledge and skill gaps, quickly design training using an agile development model, pilot and launch the training, and then measure the impact on actual performance by capturing baseline data before the class and then looking for changes that were not associated with other factors after the class. As they focused on business acumen topics (e.g. Finance for Non Financials and Project Management 101) I designed a performance management process that was aligned with the company’s vision, mission, and strategies. I also developed a core competency model in partnership with the SVP of HR and the C-level executives. As we acquired each of the number one or number two automotive aftercare products companies in their class (Axius car care products, Blue Coral and Classic waxes and washes, Black Magic and Westley's tire and wheel care products, Fix-A-Flat tire sealants, Medo air fresheners, Rain-X glass treatments, Gumout, Snap, and The Outlaw maintenance chemicals, and Slick 50 engine treatments), I visited each organization and introduced the vision, mission, strategies, core competencies, and performance management program. We were able to identify exceptional talent and incorporate them into senior positions to further the parent company culture shift to a nimble consumer products company. Other key projects included helping the company introduce a formal ideation-to-production process called Stage-Gate, implementing SAP (all of SAP), and rolling out a consultative sales model called Seven Steps Selling. We reversed a long-term decline in stock price from its low of $10/share at the start of 2001 to a high of just over $15 in mid-2002. That is when Shell Oil Products US offered $22.50/share and bought the entire company.

Like others, I was fired prior to the acquisition to cut costs. I initially created darinphillips.com in April 2002 and started work on a wireframe for a robust talent management software that would be coded in PHP on top of MySQL. I also partnered with two of my former Performa Consulting team members in May 2002 to create another new company, Mundo Strategies . We focused primarily on the Lominger products and delivered programs that were sold by Lominger Consulting. My key clients included HawaiiUSA Federal Credit Union, San Antonio Credit Union, Global Industries, and Grupo Pellas. We found a software company out of South Africa called Skillbase that had designed custom software for a client. This software automated some of the manual processes that we taught. I redesigned many of the functions to make the software more globally usable and we began to sell it in North and South America. Our consulting clients loved the functionality because they could load industry and company-specific competencies into the software (based on manual job analyses), assess employees against all of the competencies, build success profiles, compare the employee profiles to the success profiles, and guide learning activities via the built-in Individual Development Plan (IDP) engine. I was about to leave Mundo Strategies to start my own company in February 2004 when a colleague in Miami called me about an opportunity with one of his clients, the world’s second-largest cruiseline company. I set my completed software, People Prodigy, aside and moved to paradise. (People Prodigy is freely available on GitHub.)

Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd was undergoing a leadership transition in Revenue Performance and a shoreside brand segregation just as I arrived. My first initiative involved assessing the brand promises and identifying ways to operationalize them. I immersed myself in each brand, becoming the identified shoreside brand champion for both Royal Caribbean International and Celebrity Cruises. I brought the shipboard service standards from each brand to every shoreside touchpoint, both pre and post cruise. While doing this, I noticed many points of failure to deliver against these standards and I observed gross inconsistencies. I was also unconvinced that the standards were driving the employees to meet, much less exceed, customer expectations.

Leveraging a technique that I had used in graduate school called critical incident methodology, my boss and I attended tradeshows and inaugural cruises during which we surveyed RCL’s Travel Partners (travel agents). By asking them for the story of their best or worst experience with a vendor we were able to collect some very emotional stories. Because emotions are the primary drivers of customer advocacy and detraction, we did not record stories that started with an extended pause (if it does not immediately come to mind then it does not affect loyalty or engagement) or during which the Travel Partner did not show any affect. We typed up every story verbatim and had meetings with senior leaders and mid-management to review the results. In these meetings we asked the leaders to read each story aloud and to categorize the factors that led to the customer having a memorable experience (good or bad). There was considerable agreement across the 16 groups that reviewed the 172 stories. There were five key factors and each of these factors related to the way that Travel Partners were treated when they contacted or were contacted by employees. I was able to tie these five factors and the behaviors associated with each into the brand standards and into a performance management system that leveraged Kaplan and Norton’s balanced scorecard. My Quality Assurance Team began to make outbound calls to Travel Partners immediately following a contact with one of our employees and asking five questions. The Travel Partners rated the person that they just spoke with as having missed, met, or exceed expectations for each factor and why. This was given equal weight with the employee’s productivity, accuracy, and impact on revenue. We measured everyone against the metrics prior to announcing them so that we had a baseline. Once we announced the five factors and how they would be measured, we gave everyone a month to learn the system and to identify what actions and behaviors earned the best results.

I was also in charge of the shoreside training team, which only concerned itself with new hire training and had not fully engaged the business or its needs. I met with the senior leaders, who agreed that they needed to take ownership of the quality of the talent on their teams instead of leaving it up to HR. I taught several leaders in the US and UK and members of my team how to conduct rapid job analyses. The current and near-future performance objectives were used to identify tasks that are required to achieve those results. Then the competencies (knowledge, skills, experience, aptitude, behaviors, and abilities) required to execute each task flawlessly (or to recover from failure) were defined and documented. From the competencies we identified, those that were price of admission (hard-wired or commodity) were used to build sourcing and attracting strategies. We also used the price of admission competencies to create selection tools (panel interview rater job aids, scorable simulations, and behavioral interview guides). These efforts, along with my community outreach efforts, earned either RCL or me certificates of recognition from the University of Miami, Florida International University, and Jewish Community Services.

Instead of hiring 70% of the people that applied for shoreside jobs we increased the number and quality of applicants and only ended up hiring 10%. Because we had a zero-tolerance rule about the quality of talent, and because leaders and incumbents were involved in the selection process, the selection standards exceeded the initial thresholds set during the design of the process. This caused us to go into our heaviest call volume time of year (known as ‘Wave’) with 15% fewer call center employees than we were projected to need. The remaining competencies from the job analyses were used to rewrite the onboarding process, including the hew hire training. In combination with the more robust brand standards and a balanced performance management system, the new hiring and onboarding processes had several statistically significant impacts on the 2005 Wave period. RCL reduced booking errors by 76%; agents sold larger staterooms for more money (7% increase in revenue per agent); agent accuracy steadily increased in both contact centers from 71% to 89%, resulting in fewer call-backs (17% decrease in Wave 2005 call volume without a decrease in sales); the contact centers were able to maintain higher service levels with fewer employees; and Travel Partner loyalty survey results were above 97% on average. Additional benefits included several promotions for the leaders and team members who participated in rewriting and owning the talent management processes. I was suddenly involved in the planning and design of a third contact center. I was also recognized as the first RCL Admiral Award winner (highest shoreside leadership award), garnering nominations from 14 separate departments.

When the company decided to replace their core reservations software in 2006 I was moved from my normal responsibilities to this massive project. I led the Business Change Management function and partnered with Accenture, who had been brought in to gather requirements and ensure that the company did not make any mistakes. I wrote and managed the Business Change Management Strategy and Plan, the project Communication Strategy and Plan, and executed both so that all stakeholders and executives remained engaged and supportive of the project’s objectives and effort. The nature of my work was sensitive and confidential so I cannot elaborate, but I learned a lot about being politically savvy and negotiating effectively to prevent huge, ego-driven mistakes. When Project Churchill wound down I was facing six potential moves within Royal Caribbean. That is when I met the senior executives from Bayview Financial and Silver Hill Financial and they presented a seventh choice.

Silver Hill knew that they were not going to compete on rate or property valuation so they needed to compete on customer value and service quality. They did not know what exactly they needed to do, but they had read up on customer experience management and decided to look for someone to lead that effort. I originally only intended to help them identify what could be done based on what I had accomplished at Royal Caribbean. Silver Hill realized that I had been recognized by Marcus Evans, APQC, International Quality & Productivity Center, The Conference Board, and the North American Conference on Customer Management because I was sharing the same techniques, tools, and tips with Silver Hill that I had presented at these conferences – so in January 2007 they made me a fabulous offer. Although Silver Hill was already identified as the “least worst lender” in our niche, we wanted to be known as the hassle-free best so that customers (mortgage brokers, small banks, and correspondent lenders) would find it very difficult to defect to another lender with lower rates or higher appraised property valuation. We also needed to be a broker’s first call so that we could control referrals for deals that did not fit our programs. Finally, we needed to dramatically increase the number of repeat deals that we did with each customer because our cost of sale is very high.

The customer experience management and talent management work that I did in 2007 uncovered problems in the marketing message, Sales and Operations processes, communication, and other areas that are common problems in any company. I was able to convince the Marketing team that a consistent and accurate message was needed so the brand was refreshed. My team mapped the customer’s experience and helped the Sales and Operations teams identify disconnects between what we thought we were accomplishing and how the customer was affected. I helped business leaders learn how to map and improve processes (significant redundancy was removed, which sped up the processing of loan files). My team drafted standard status communications and worked with the line employees to define the timing for those messages and other updates. I replicated the Voice of the Customer research project with similar results; however, this time the message from the customers was far more powerful as it helped Account Managers and executives let go of the belief that rate and real estate valuation were the two most critical lender attributes. At Silver Hill we also discovered that one of the top six factors was “consistent processing of the loan file”, which was the opposite of what we prided ourselves on – flexibility. This gave my team further authority to identify and prevent future inconsistencies across the three US Operations offices. Also, job analyses were done and leveraged (for sourcing, attracting, selecting, onboarding, training, driving, and rewarding). An unusual combination of projects reaching their go-live date actually caused file processing time to decrease the same month that total closing volumes jumped nearly 25%. We closed over $100MM in small balance commercial loans in November following 10 months of stagnation (averaging $80MM per month). This allowed us to finally realize the company’s goal of “Bust a Billion” in annual closings.

As 2008 began, Silver Hill found itself in the enviable position of having outlived a vast majority of its competitors. By March, the only real nationwide competition for small balance commercial loans included our sister company, Interbay, and Key Bank. However, our focus is on continuing to streamline and improve our processes and our communication. The key is to survive the credit crunch and, at the same time, become even more effective at establishing and managing our customers’ expectations and emotions. When the real estate and bond markets bounce back, Silver Hill will be the one company that continued to provide exceptional service to the mortgage broker and small bank communities. It will be difficult for anyone to replicate what we bring to the table. That will make it very painful for any of our customers to leave us, and it will ensure that we are not only their first call, but we are their favorite place to bring multiple deals.

When the top two leaders of the Silver Hill University left in early 2008, I was asked to assume the role of Chief Learning Officer (without giving up my responsibilities as Director, Customer Experience). The team of twelve trainers was primarily used to deliver new hire training and follow-up courses that might bridge soft skills gaps. I immediately identified opportunities to improve the 42 actual courses that had been delivered and then challenged the team members to learn how to become performance support consultants to the business. I provided my new team with a great deal of training on competency-based talent management and made a case for delivering on-demand information to existing employees and measuring results only through improved knowledge, skill, or performance metrics. I also trained the team to be performance improvement consultants so that they could help the team leaders tackle all problems that were not going to improve through training. (Training only increases knowledge and skill, but many people were being sent to training because they did not know what their goals were, they were using faulty resources, they were not motivated to perform, etc.)

We completed several proof-of-concept projects to excite the company about the potential of our just-in-time solutions and to get the support and backing of IT. We took a blended approach to learning that incorporated knowledge acquisition (learning from books, articles, blogs, podcasts, screencasts, videos, live behavior modeling, job aids, facilitated case studies, and/or instructor-led classes), knowledge application (developmental assignments and/or simulations), and feedback (from a trainer/consultant, subject matter expert, boss, and/or mentor). I found that using wikis could provide the fastest, searchable access to much-needed information so we were looking for a free enterprise solution to install. We created a library of Wink screencasts and videos for three primary reasons: they are best at modeling how to apply a skill, we can filter out a subject matter expert's bad habits, and these solutions provide on-demand access 24/7. The boss is the best source of performance feedback and the quality of that feedback improves greatly if you provide the boss with two tools: knowledge tests and behavioral checklist assessments – so we created those for each class. We also went back to the job analyses, which uncovered missing learning content. Finally, we put together a more effective onboarding process and new hire training for both Operations and Sales people so that when we geared up for growth again, our new hires would take far less than today’s six months to ramp up to average performance.

But, alas, the securities markets continued to crash…

I was moved into the parent company, Bayview Asset Management as the VP of HR. In my new role, I built and launched a talent assessment program. I force-ranked all 2,700 employees across every company based on potential (learning agility assessments and quantitative performance metrics). No good deed goes unpunished, so I ended up being like George Clooney’s character in “Up In The Air” - but I started a year before the movie came out. I carried folders around the office filled with severance packages (and boxes of tissues). By the time we got down to 500 employees in 2009, I finally transitioned to growth mode because we leveraged an existing business, Bayview Loan Servicing, to help investors (mostly banks) mitigate losses on non-performing mortgages. By this time, I was the leader of Marketing for BLS and the liaison between our company and our industry’s rating agencies (plus, the industry’s lobby, Hope Now in Washington D.C.). I was also banned by BAM from publishing any more blogs, books, and articles - or speaking at conferences - because the SEC determined that I had access to privileged information.

I mapped out a new organizational structure, including creating job profiles for all key positions. The high potential work was leveraged to fill all of the seats on the new bus. BLS went from under 50 people to over 400 people very, very quickly. From the job profiles I mapped out a selection process, including assessments, and quickly evaluated the fit and readiness of all remaining employees. All leaders ended up having multi-rater assessments, individual development plans, and coaches/mentors, so that we did not miss a beat. Much of this work leveraged the Lominger Leadership Architect products as I was already certified and experienced with all of them.

My role in February 2010 became what I would refer to as an “ombudsman” for our bank clients. Every time a new client negotiated their contract, I was responsible for ensuring all service level agreements were realistic and achievable. If, at any time, our servicing metrics were not as projected, I had to step in and micro-manage BLS (and smooth things over with the clients). I actively mitigated service failures by continuously identifying potential problems and launching initiatives to prevent or mitigate them. I did not have any direct reports, so I built an army of followers that I could influence without authority by providing training on topics like project management and performance improvement. Plus, this group of influencers gain visibility as we build KPIs that gamified the contact center and customer personas that had strong, measurable impacts on the overall business. Behaviorally-Anchored Rating Scales and customer journey maps were quickly adopted, the use of heuristics and cognitive bias were smoothly implemented, position profiles were quickly updated, and new hire training was overhauled.

During 2011, I was allowed to hire and manage a small team. We built and actively reported on balanced scorecards across all servicing teams. Many of the problems the prior year had been plugged by adding headcount, which made servicing unprofitable. We identified and eliminated 25 poor performers. We automated several activities after mapping key processes, creating excess capacity for future growth (and eliminating another 43 positions). Instead of immediately letting good performers go, we plugged them into new positions that were affected by voluntary attrition. In 8 months my team eliminated the need for 12% of BLS’ workforce without any drop-off in productivity or quality.

By August 2011 I was put in charge of another team, Human Resources. BLS had landed several large servicing contracts and had to grow quickly. However, first, I had to convert a transactional and compliance-focused department into a strategic asset. Some of them were excited to go through this transformation. Some of them were not looking forward to working. I applied my typical “take over leading this team” approach.

• Interview the key stakeholders (HR’s customers/clients inside the organization)
• Facilitate Critical Incident Methodology with employees at all levels to understand what is most important
• Design and launch employee experience, employee engagement, and employee satisfaction survey
• Map out objectives, KRAs, and KPIs based on findings and cascading company objectives
• Map current processes and audit critical practices and vendors/tools
• Identify disconnects, dead-ends, ineffective, and inefficient processes (based on business and employee requirements - and metrics)
• Map the to-be processes (including required roles)
• Document position profiles for required objectives, tasks, and competencies
• Design and develop source, attract, select, and onboarding/training processes and assessments for every role
• Then launch all of the performance improvement initiatives, including evaluation of all existing HR team members

Numerous changes were launched over the next 3 years. We delivered analytics and insights to business leaders so that they could identify and respond to trends (e.g. online reputation/ratings, internal pulse surveys, unscheduled time off, time from position approval to first day at work). We treated recruiting as if it was Customer Experience with journey maps, candidate (and hiring manager) effort scores, and time to reach average productivity. Employee Engagement Communities drove EX survey scores higher and we reached “Great Rated!” status from Fortune’s Best Places to Work in 2012. I also designed both a high-potential employee rotation program and an Associate Program for summer interns. It should be noted that a number of the original HR processes had to be radically redesigned to ensure full compliance with both client requirements and laws/regulations. I earned nearly perfect scores on every client audit and won every former employee charge.

I continued to manage multiple teams while running HR. I built a Reputation Management Council, which launched initiatives that increased our online scores on both customer and employee-facing rating sites. I also designed and managed the project plans to form two new companies, Lakeview Loan Servicing and Silver Hill Funding.

Human Resources moved to another leader in 2014. I had taken on several new teams and I needed to focus on redesigning them and improving their performance. For the next five years I managed the teams focused on knowledge, performance, engagement, marketing, communications, customer experience, innovation, and digital transformation. I was conducting a symphony that radically reimagined how the non-performing mortgage customers could be served, while still staying in full compliance with all laws, regulations and client demands. This involved training both employees and customers on how and where to find accurate, complete, and timely information. All communications and touch points were completely revised, including a self-serve website with not only specialized landing pages, how-to guides, and online videos, but all FAQs were turned into a rule-based chatbot. I designed a framework and strawman whereby customers could use natural language to access their current and historical mortgage information. I identified the machine-learning solution and how to secure the account information. Utilizing internal and external talent, this solution went live in 2019. Once the employees and customers were trained on its use, call volume dropped by 18% and complaints per loan dropped by 90%. Mike drop, I was out.

I left with a sizable nest egg and decided to bootstrap a few ideas - and go back to writing books. My first advisory “client” was itopia and I treated it as a full-time job because a majority of my compensation was to be equity. The company was a tech team and the CEO, who doubled as the lone salesperson. They wanted to rapidly scale up. I designed the brand vision, strategies, messaging, positioning, marketing, PR, and sales approach. I personally designed and developed their marketing and sales processes, playbooks, and collateral. I recruited and trained marketing, sales, and support staff. I also took over contract negotiations and deal approvals, client onboarding, and our relationship with key stakeholders. After setting them up for success and have a significant impact on MQLs, ARR, and the OKRs, I turned the teams over to one of the leaders we hired.

Rebooting DarinPhillips.com, I intended to provide advisory services for tech startups that included both customer experience and employee experience solutions. However, you go where the clients take you, and that meant a lot of engagements related to human resources issues. I tackled a lot of problems caused by startup founders hiring a recruiter and then promoting that person to build and run HR (or People Team). Founders also jumped on the diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB) bandwagon based on some studies that showed extremely beneficial impacts. I helped guide them into doing it in a way that did not discriminate or create adverse impact, but still helped them realize the benefits of “culture add” and unique ideas and points of view. Most of the clients agreed to me publishing two books in 2021 with their stories - but not their names.

In 2023 I was hired by several tech and gaming companies to facilitate outplacement for employees affected by reductions (RIF). I was also volunteering for Candoor by providing underserved college students and early career professionals with career transition services. I had converted these conversations into a workbook in 2022 and that helped the people who were looking to move on. Though that workbook was developed into an app by Coleen Salvador, we did not sell it. It is freely available on GitHub.

The tech startup clients also asked me to help them identify how to leverage machine learning (aka AI) to speed up access to HR advice and information. That exposed me to multiple solutions (Open AI’s GPT-3, Anthropic’s Claude, Meta’s LLaMA, Google’s Bard/Gemini, Mistral’s Mixtral, DeepSeek, and Alibaba’s Qwen), prompt engineering, and fine-tuning. The goal was to prevent or mitigate hallucinations while still getting a complete and accurate answer. The main benefit was for the small HR team or person, who could quickly generate much better communications, policies, and other collateral. Applying LLMs (and multimodal AI) to recruiting is the biggest bust. Excellent candidates are being overlooked and my clients have been flooded with LLM-generated resumes. The tech was advancing so quickly that I started and killed several books on automating HR. I decided to simply publish some posts on LinkedIn that covered the FAQs I was getting.

With my free time, I have been writing and publishing books and mobile apps. Grand Dude Studios allows me to apply both my early counseling career with my industrial-organizational psychology expertise. I write stories that help children learn how to manage emotional and social challenges. For fun, I also design mobile games under Grand Dude Games. Those are available for both Android devices via the Google Play Store and on other devices using Itch.io.

I used multiple websites to source and hire independent contractors as illustrators and virtual assistants. I kept finding that talent from the Philippines was the best based on the balance of cost and quality. They are also very eager to please and super polite. I learned about the laws, regulations, and challenges from both countries, including the US Income Tax Treaty. When I shared my experiences with other founders, I heard back that they also had great experiences with contract help. (You should not hire employees, only independent contractors.) The advice I dispensed turned into dozens of blog entries for a new SaaS project in 2024. FilipinoContractors.com went live in 2025.

Based on the early success of FilipinoContractors.com, my team decided to build another job board for customer experience professionals. As the manager of one of LinkedIn’s largest groups, Customer Experience Professionals, it made sense to build a SaaS platform to help the members of that group stay on top of the job market. CustomerExperienceJobs.com went live in early 2025.