Our Story

We started IGNITE because we kept watching the same pattern.

The change program would do its job. Communications went out on time. Training hit its targets. Readiness dashboards showed green. And six months later, half the organization was working around the new system.

It wasn't a people problem. It wasn't an execution problem. It was a structural one. The operating environment—what gets measured, who has decision rights, how work flows, what the old process makes easy—never changed. Intact conditions produce the old behavior. Every time. We built IGNITE to work on those conditions.

What We Believe

The change program has a ceiling. We work above it.

Most change programs do exactly what they're designed to do. They communicate the vision. They train people on the new system. They report readiness. And they stop at the limit of what communications and training can produce.

That limit is structural. Communications change what people know. Training changes what people can do. Neither one changes what the environment rewards, measures, or makes easy. The behavior that persists after a transformation is determined by the operating environment, not the change program.

IGNITE catalogs 83 structural conditions across 14 domains. We diagnose which ones are producing the old behavior. And we put the structural decisions in front of the people with the authority to make them. That's not change management. It's environment design.

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How We Work

Three ways in. One structural approach.

Adoption

The full environment design engagement. We embed with your team, diagnose the 14 structural domains in operational context, and design the conditions that make the new way of working the path of least resistance.

Permanence

Direct structural architecture work. IGNITE's Managing Partner works with the sponsor or portfolio company CEO on the systemic decisions that make the transformation irreversible. Decision rights. Metrics. Workflow redesign. Role definitions at the leadership level.

Operator Path

Production stress-testing for frontier-tech organizations. We take a single structural domain, test it under real operating conditions, and deliver a fix in one sprint. Then the next. Results compound.

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The Team

No bench. No generalists filling seats.

IGNITE operates through a network of independent consultants, each selected for their specific experience and assembled to match the demands of the engagement. The people below are the consultants who carry the structural approach into client environments.

Managing Partner — Founder

Miguel Guevara

Miguel has spent nearly 30 years inside enterprise transformations. ERP programs. Post-merger integrations. AI deployments. Frontier-tech scaling. Fortune 500 organizations across the United States, Latin America, Europe, and Asia. Clients have included Anduril, Amazon, Grainger, Johnson Controls, SC Johnson, Edelman, Beam Suntory, and Advantage Solutions.

The pattern that led to IGNITE showed up early and repeated across every environment. Organizations would invest years and millions in new systems, run the change program with discipline, hit every milestone, and still find the workforce operating the old way months after go-live. The structural conditions around the change—decision rights that were never reassigned, metrics that still rewarded the old behavior, parallel processes that nobody had authority to shut down—never moved.

Miguel leads IGNITE's Permanence engagements, working directly with enterprise sponsors and portfolio company executives on the decisions that make transformations irreversible. He also leads the firm's AI product development, building IGNITE's structural methodology into tools that put diagnostic capability directly in practitioners' hands.

Director of Operations & Senior Consultant

Jake Barber

Jake brings over a decade of experience in business operations, process automation, and systems design across Fortune 500 companies and high-growth firms. He built IGNITE's operational platform from the ground up, replacing disconnected systems with integrated infrastructure for financial management, resource planning, client tracking, and project delivery.

On the client side, Jake's work sits where structural conditions meet the systems that produce them. For a defense technology client, he led AI workflow design for training program management, coordinating across multiple functions to surface readiness data that leadership could act on without chasing updates. He also redesigned an ERP implementation tracking system from 150+ fragmented tables into 25–30 connected tables with automated reporting that surfaces training completion, adoption metrics, and go-live readiness for leadership in real time.

Jake brings a systems designer's instinct to every engagement. When the structural conditions we diagnose involve data fragmentation, manual workarounds, or disconnected tools, he's the one who redesigns the operating infrastructure so the new behavior is the only available path.

Senior Consultant

Nicole Quick

Nicole brings over 25 years of experience across healthcare, manufacturing, financial services, and consumer goods. She started in GE's Financial Management Program, moved through process improvement leadership at Advocate Health and Catholic Healthcare Partners, managed clinic operations at Northwestern Medicine, and spent nearly seven years as a senior consultant at Integris Performance Advisors.

That path matters because Nicole has operated on both sides of the problem. She has been the operations manager absorbing the impact of a transformation she didn't design, and the consultant diagnosing why the transformation stalled. That dual perspective gives her a read on operating conditions that most practitioners miss.

At IGNITE, Nicole works at two levels simultaneously: supporting the strategic direction of system integrations and project portfolios, while also doing the pragmatic change work that makes the strategy operational—communications planning, readiness tracking, and practitioner coaching that keeps the engagement moving between sponsor decisions.

Consultant — ERP Adoption & Systems Integration

Nick Barber

Nick brings nearly a decade of experience across enterprise system transformations, AI deployments, and process automation at scale. At Johnson Controls, he served as AI Technical Product Owner for an HR Conversational AI Assistant serving 85,000 employees and led continuous improvement work including a global restructuring tracking program targeting $500M in headcount savings.

For IGNITE, Nick leads ERP adoption for a defense technology organization's enterprise system transformation, transitioning five business functions from legacy systems to Oracle, Odoo, and Avalara. He developed and delivered over 200 training assets impacting 2,000+ employees, working directly with function leaders and subject matter experts to build role-specific content.

Nick operates where operating conditions meet the technical systems that produce them. When the diagnosis reveals that decision rights, workflow design, or system architecture are creating friction, Nick maps the current state, designs the fix, and builds the infrastructure to make it hold.

Consultant

Matt Halverson

Matt brings nine years of consulting experience focused on ERP implementations, process integrations, and organizational change across Fortune 500 environments. He holds a degree in Management Information Systems from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire.

Matt has worked the detail layer of ERP and process integrations—the level where structural conditions either hold or collapse under operational reality. He's watched the patterns repeat across industries and environments, and he knows where the gap between the plan and the actual work opens up.

Matt also coaches change practitioners on minimally viable approaches to system integration support, helping teams strip away process theater and focus on the activities that produce real adoption.

By the Numbers

What we bring to the work.

Years of field experience across enterprise, frontier-tech, and PE-backed transformations

Structural conditions cataloged across 14 diagnostic domains

Structural domains mapped in every diagnostic

Named enterprise clients including Anduril, Amazon, Grainger, and Johnson Controls

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See where the structure breaks.

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Two tools. No login. No cost. The Sponsor Assessment maps structural gaps for enterprise leaders and PE operating partners. The Operator Stress Test does the same in operator language for frontier-tech leaders.

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Bring your assessment results or just bring the question. No pitch. Structural diagnosis only.

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