About the founder
I've sat on both sides of the table.
Early in my career, I was the most motivated person in the room.
I showed up early. Stayed late. Cared more than most. And something still wasn't translating.
I was being perceived as less capable than I knew I was — not because I lacked the skills, but because I was missing the invisible operating layer that nobody teaches you. The rules of how work actually gets evaluated. How trust actually gets built. How capable people actually become the ones everyone wants on their team.
I spent years figuring it out the hard way. Through missed expectations, quiet feedback, and slowly — sometimes painfully — learning what had been right in front of me the whole time.
Then I spent 15 years on the other side.
Hiring hundreds of professionals. Running teams inside Fortune 100 companies. Sitting in performance reviews. Evaluating potential. And I watched the same pattern repeat itself over and over and over.
Capable, motivated people. Missing the map.
Not because they weren't talented. Because nobody had ever made the operating layer explicit. Nobody had ever structured it, taught it, or handed it to them as a system they could actually use.
So managers spent enormous time teaching it informally — how to clarify work, how to communicate progress, how to apply judgment when expectations weren't clear. Essential operating behavior. Never designed. Never standardized. Learned through trial and error by everyone who ever walked in the door.
So I stopped asking how to train people better.
I started asking: what are managers actually evaluating?
The answer was clear. They weren't evaluating skill. They were evaluating how people operate.
And that operating layer — the unwritten rules, the unspoken standards, the invisible dynamics that actually determine who succeeds, who stalls, and who never figures out why — was completely teachable. It just hadn't been taught.
Real Work Ready™ is what I built when I finally decided someone had to write it down.