Small Business Today Magazine OCT 2014 THE EFFORT COMPANIES | Page 10

spect and he had to exhibit leadership with people from different
countries who spoke different languages as well. This began a career built on learning various kinds of skills, working with a diverse
group of people, and then expanding businesses throughout the
country and the world.

The company continued to be successful and grew even more.
As companies grow, roles and responsibilities can change as well.
New players became involved with the company and each of
them did things differently. Frustrated with the situation, Chuck
chose to leave the company.

While working in a senior management role dealing with the
global supply chain, Chuck had built up a strong expertise in maintenance management in the oil industry. He had always been a
perfectionist in everything he had done and expected the same
regarding the efficiency in the areas he dealt with. He saw how
things were not running efficiently and consistently but his ideas
to improve things were received with deaf ears. It was at this
point that he realized he had hit a glass ceiling and decided to
leave the company.

So, in March of 2005, Chuck opened up his own consulting
company and named it WorldPMO to deliver project and program management services. PMO stands for Project Management
Organization and the company’s tagline is Program Management
Services. All of that training Chuck had gotten over the previous
20 years in engineering design and delivery, dealing with the global
supply chain, and traveling around the world empowered Chuck
in creating a company capable of helping a lot of people. After all,
people need to know how to deliver things. People do projects
every day, whether it’s on an individual level or a corporate level. They have to be able to do that effectively and efficiently and
Chuck knows how.

As the head of drilling systems was driving him home, the gentleman kindly told Chuck that he thought differently than others
and handed him a book about mavericks. Even though Chuck
had considered him an adversary, he was kind of flattered. He
had never thought of himself as a maverick but all the while home
he kept thinking, “Maybe I do think differently!”
After quitting his job, Chuck jumped into the field of IT which
was new in the 1990s. He took on the role of the IT director with a software company doing trading desk software. On
the horizon was the deregulation of the power industry. This
company had already developed the software that dealt with
tracking gas and oil so converting that to the power industry
was not a huge jump. This positioned the company into a very
good space. Unfortunately, it came to a point that there was
a meltdown in the senior levels and Chuck was one of those
who got the axe.
After getting a taste of the IT arena, lots of ideas kept bubbling
out of Chuck’s mind. Meanwhile, he realized that he needed to
go out and do some other work so he responded to a request
for some help with an asset sale. He had never thought that he
had much experience in that area but then realized that he had
been partly involved with 16 acquisitions. He was asked to be
the support on the technology side of a refinery sale. He jumped
into that and did so well that other people were saying that they
had never seen it done like that. Capitalizing on his inventiveness,
Chuck started writing all of the materials on how to do them and
how to do all the due diligence and other pertinent details. At
that point, Chuck made the life changing decision to permanently
leave corporate America and enter the world of entrepreneurship. So with a partner, Chuck started the company Merger Tree.
He came up with the idea to put together a plan for a whole
merger and acquisition suite and then turn them into a variety
of software products.Things went very well for the first year and
then the dot-com industry went bust. After retooling things a
little bit, they began offering IT services to small companies and
high wealth families.
8 SMALL BUSINESS TODAY MAGAZINE [ OCTOBER 2014 ]

Once Chuck started WorldPMO in 2005, it grew on its own.
He hadn’t really put together any kind of marketing strategy. “That
really wasn’t the point. The point was that I’m a designer and engineer by heart and all I wanted to do was look at a better way to
deliver projects on time, on budget, and ultimately with the outcome that somebody wanted,” expressed Chuck. Down the road
in 2007, Chuck had an epiphany. There was a much better way to
help his customers effectively deliver EFFORT.
Chuck elaborated,“I would always pray for wisdom and it kind of
just flashed and I saw the whole thing. That is where the vision of
EFFORT was born. It’s not about