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Building the future: From grandma’s basement to a team of 460

Paid advertisement by Fresh Consulting. 

Fresh Consulting launched in 2007, the same year as the first iPhone, at the advent of the digital transformation movement. I started with one central goal: help companies stay fresh. In order to launch the company and keep it alive in the Great Recession, I moved into my grandma’s basement, maxed out personal and business credit cards, begrudgingly sold my mountain bike, and took out my 401(k) at penalty. 

During my undergrad at BYU, I taught snowboarding at Park City, earning my Level 3 AASI certification as a snowboard instructor trainer. When I realized that wouldn’t pay the bills, I carried that passion into my first online snowboarding business in the dot-com rush. I recruited a team to run it while I left for a two-year mission in Peru, only to return and find the dot-com bubble had burst.

While at school, I got digital experience building BYU’s first website competition and launching a job portal connecting businesses and software developers. I also met my wife, Kari, from Bountiful, who shared a passion for the slopes. After sealing my most important deal ever with her, I continued with my master’s in accounting.  

My trajectory changed when I failed a consulting job interview and pondered the problem for months. That led me to the Management Consulting Club, where I got to practice more and became VP. Eventually, my first job out of school was in Deloitte’s consulting strategy group, recognizing I truly wanted to work on the future vs. the past. There, consulting for companies like Apple, I saw firsthand the need for a new holistic and cross-disciplinary approach to emerging technology.

That experience motivated me to launch Fresh at a time when companies really needed to “stay fresh” to stay alive. After building a digital services company for 10 years, we looked at where the future was going and realized we needed to evolve to stay innovative ourselves. In 2018, we acquired a hardware company to prepare for an even more integrated future. Now we design and build anything from enterprise software, automation systems, and mobile apps to hardware products, robots, IoT and autonomous vehicles.  

Three more acquisitions helped maximize Fresh’s innovation capabilities to circle back to where we started—helping companies stay fresh but now with the capability to create and build the future. As a services company focused on innovation, Fresh’s practice is built on the multi-disciplinary core capabilities of strategy, design, software and hardware.  

Today, Fresh is 460 strong, and we work with most of the world’s largest tech companies. We’re proud to name Utah-based The Cynosure Group as our key investor. Headquartered just outside of Seattle, we currently have five offices worldwide, with a growing team in the place where I was first mentored—Utah. I’m grateful for the ways that Utah helped shape the roots of Fresh, and we’ll continue to invest in the communities that have fostered our fast-paced growth.