About Wade Myers
Wade was enlisted in the US Army Reserve during college and was assigned to a cold-weather light infantry unit in Minnesota that supported an active duty mountain unit in Alaska. He was an M-60 machine gunner and enjoyed the rugged training which included snow shoeing, downhill and cross-country skiing, pulling ahkios (man-drawn sleds used by Arctic warriors), over-white camouflage, and bivouacs in weather that reached more than 50 degrees below zero. He graduated from North Dakota State University (NDSU) as a Distinguished Military Graduate in ROTC and accepted a regular army commission as an Engineer officer.
He attended the Engineer Officer’s Basic Course in Fort Belvoir, VA where he graduated at the top of his class. While at the training he was talked into applying for Ranger training by two of his friends. During the grueling Ranger training Wade lost 49 pounds on the meager rations and no scheduled sleep (meant to simulate the rigors of combat). He probably wouldn’t have made it through the training without the encouragement of his friends and the wild berries he gobbled up during the Mountain phase.
He went on to attend several other specialized training programs including atomic demolitions and munitions training, Airborne, Air Assault, and several explosives programs. His first assignment was commanding a 30-man special weapons unit that was trained to deploy regular and atomic demolitions anywhere in the world. He also helped develop new military doctrine for atomic demolitions and developmental liquid and slurry-based explosives. His assignments included serving as an executive officer for a 120-man engineer company.
His desire to return to special operations was met with orders instead to go to Turkey and build a dam as an engineer, so he resigned his commission and headed to the corporate world.
Wade continued his military service during his stint at Mobil Chemical by serving in the Army Reserves where he commanded a 160-person combat engineer company and held several facilities engineer positions. He re-entered active duty to fight in the Gulf War and was a facilities management operations executive for 600,000 soldiers and Arab liaison officer to the Northern Arab Command. He quickly learned just enough Arabic to endear himself to close Arab friends while landing in trouble on a few occasions that thankfully turned into humorous anecdotes rather than creating an international crisis.
His military decorations include the Bronze Star, Southwest Asia Service Medal with two bronze service stars, National Defense Service Medal, Kuwait Liberation Medal, Army Commendation Medal, Army Achievement Medal, Army Service Ribbon, Ranger Tab, Parachutist Badge, Air Assault Badge, and ROTC Distinguished Military Graduate.
Wade held a top-secret security clearance with NATO cosmic atomal access privileges.
Wade left the military to climb the corporate ladder at the Plastics Packaging division of Mobil Chemical, a subsidiary of what was then the Mobil Corporation (now ExxonMobil). He held several positions starting as a territory Sales Representative for the state of Wisconsin, and was promoted to higher levels of responsibility including the roles of Regional Product Manager, Regional Sales Manager, Regional Product/Sales Manager, and culminating as a National Market Development Manager with executive marketing and product management responsibilities for a $150 million national product line.
His time at Mobil was interrupted for six months when he was recalled to active duty to serve in the Gulf War in 1991. While the pace of corporate life was intense and time consuming, Wade learned much from the comprehensive training and development programs and the five positions he held during his seven years at the company. While he was usually embarrassed to admit that he sold plastic trash bags, plastic grocery bags, and disposable foam plates, bowls, and meat trays for a living, the experience of sales, marketing, negotiation, and leadership equipped him well to be an entrepreneur later in his career.
Wade is a serial entrepreneur that has founded in and invested in over 100 startups and completed scores of mergers and acquisitions.
He started selling door-to-door as a boy and worked full time most of his high school and college years at many jobs and at-risk ventures to put himself through school.
His startup and business building focus has been on software and tech-enabled services companies that have high gross margins, recurring revenue, and repeatable and scalable offerings. His startups have included:
- – A tech-enabled investment banking firm that was sold to JP Morgan within just 22 months of launch
- – A global SaaS-based big data firm that was capitalized with $75m in venture capital prior to selling to a public company
- – A tech-enabled government services firm that was sold to Pitney Bowes.
- – An Inc. 5000 nationwide SaaS-based real estate services company that has grown into the third-largest firm among several thousand competitors in its industry.
His awards include the following:
- – The Inc. 5000 award for co-founding one of the fastest growing private companies in America
- – The Minnesota Tekne Award for Application of Technology
- – Finalist for the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award
Wade has been a featured speaker at investment banking, venture capital, private equity, technology, and entrepreneurship conferences. He has also taught seminars at top business schools.
Wade’s topics typically include:
- – Entrepreneurship
- – Startups
- – Financing Strategy
- – Growth Strategy
- – M&A Strategy
- – Family Business
- – Faith-Based Business
- – Exit Strategies
Wade invests across multiple asset classes through Boldmore Growth Partners, his family office, and through several funds he co-founded, including Eagle Venture Fund, a global venture capital fund with offices in the U.S., Europe, and Asia.
Wade’s advisory skills were honed while at the Boston Consulting Group, one of the world’s leading strategy consulting firms where he consulted with clients on strategy, growth, and transformation. One of his most notable achievements was helping set the stage for the transformation of travel distribution by delivering the foundational strategy for the largest Internet-based travel agency and the strategy for the first ticketless airline process for the largest U.S. airline.
His current advisory focus is to help startup entrepreneurs via his business planning resources at Pro Forma, which are used by entrepreneurs in over 90 countries. The app includes all 161 global currencies and meets both IFRS and GAAP standards.
Wade grew up on a small cattle ranch in the Badlands of western North Dakota. His father was Irish and his mother was from a German Mennonite family that moved to the area from a Mennonite colony in Indiana to take a land grant. Early family life was greatly influenced by Mennonite teachings and lifestyle.
The lack of resources and infrastructure meant he and his siblings were raised without electricity, without indoor plumbing, and without television (well there was a brief time of watching TV with a generator until Wade’s mother caught the kids watching cartoons instead of doing their chores – she smashed the tube with a brick). The family worked hard and enjoyed a simple rural life. His parents modeled a wonderful marriage, hard work, and the need for education, even though they themselves were not highly educated (8th grade and high school).
Wade was a voracious reader as a boy and his favorite summer break was sitting in the shade under a Chestnut crabapple tree munching on apples, reading adventure stories, and dreaming of one day seeing the world outside of his small, rural county. He begged his mother to buy him a suit so he could look like a “business man” while in grade school (pictured below).
Wade attended a small red brick country school in rural North Dakota with six classmates and graduated from high school at the nearby county school with 33 classmates.
He started working as a roofer’s assistant after school in the sixth grade. In high school he often worked the midnight to 8 AM shift at a local truck stop. He did his homework at the counter between refueling eighteen-wheelers, changing oil, and selling tires. After clocking out when the manager arrived in the morning, he showered in the trucker’s shower and raced to school to beat the morning bell.
He was determined to go to Alaska after high school to weld on the pipeline to increase his hourly pay, but his best friend talked Wade into driving with him to college. Wade never caught the bus back home as planned after the road trip. Instead, he enrolled in college and took the first job he came to in the want ads (as a breakfast cook) to pay his tuition while crashing on a cot at his sister’s home. He ended up staying in college.
Wade graduated with honors from North Dakota State University with a Bachelor’s degree in Agricultural Economics. He worked full time during college at various jobs and entrepreneurial pursuits. His roles included computer programmer, teacher’s assistant, heavy equipment operator (during the summers – it paid the most), and as a dance and concert producer. He washed dishes for his fraternity in exchange for meals. He joined ROTC because he needed the $100 per month and he was interested in serving his country after college.
While serving as a full-time military officer, Wade graduated from Texas A&M University’s Central Texas campus with a Master’s degree in Computer Information Systems with a perfect 4.00.
After returning from fighting in the Gulf War, Wade considered an MBA to further prepare to be an entrepreneur, but he was so busy working that he did not have time to study for the GMAT. Consequently he applied to the only MBA program that did not require a GMAT that year and was accepted by the Harvard Business School where he graduated as a Baker Scholar (a designation for the top 5% of the class of 918 students). Wade worked as a consultant during school to help pay the bills.
Wade continued his affiliation with Harvard as a research fellow and worked with two HBS professors to create an executive education program in Strategic Sales Management. His role included case study authoring and helping teach the first session of the program. While Harvard’s interest in his return to the school to get a Doctorate degree and stay on as a professor was attractive, his entrepreneurial pursuits kept him too busy to seriously consider the opportunity.
Although Wade flirted with faith earlier in life, his serious faith journey began in Dallas after graduate school where he was asked one evening by a smart, successful attorney whether or not he knew what would happen when he died. Wade responded that everyone could earn salvation through whatever religion they embraced, but he was challenged on the veracity of that response (“…how could everyone just make up their own rules about salvation and eternity and magically end up where they wanted to be?”) He was then encouraged to investigate the issue of faith with the same analytic rigor he used for clients in his work at the Boston Consulting Group.
Wade subsequently embarked on a personal journey of discovery and studied the historical, mathematical, prophetic, logical, bibliographic, archeological, and scientific evidence for the truths taught by each of the world’s major religions. As a result, many inconsistencies with religious pluralism became readily apparent. All major religions – while embracing some common good – were vastly different in terms of what they considered true, what they taught about God, the condition of man, the basis of salvation, etc. Obviously they couldn’t possibly all be true – there were too many irreconcilable differences and it violated the law of noncontradiction. He began ruling out faith systems that failed his framework of truth: they were either logically inconsistent, lacked comprehensiveness, or lacked sufficient evidence.
Over that period of a year of intellectually-honest inquiry, Wade was reluctantly led to the answer that the Bible was uniquely true and that the historic person of Jesus Christ was real and needed to be dealt with: he could either accept Jesus or reject Jesus, but he couldn’t deny that Jesus existed and had made unique claims. Wade decided to make a commitment as a Christian. His faith become a priority that helped him be much more “others focused” with a goal of honoring God while developing high-quality, meaningful relationships. The end result is a purposeful life that is very fulfilling and enjoyable. Life isn’t any easier, but the lens through which he views the world – and the purpose for which he lives – is vastly different.
Wade and his wife Lisa live in the Fort Worth area and are blessed to have a blended family of seven wonderful children ranging from Arizona to New York.
