Our Team
Brian McCollough
Chief Strategy Officer
Business Engineer | Fractional COO | M&A Advisor | Fractional CSO
Brian's first instinct when he walks into a business isn't to fix anything. It's to listen. Before recommending a single change, he sits down with the owner and asks two questions: what went right last year, and what didn't. That conversation — direct, unfiltered, and without an agenda — tells him more about a business than any assessment. What follows is a structured diagnostic process built to surface the real problem: not the loudest complaint, but the underlying issue that, if addressed, makes everything else easier.
Brian calls this discipline Business Engineering. The VITAL Assessment™ is the instrument he built to do it — a proprietary diagnostic framework examining Vision, Intelligence, Team, Accountability, and Leverage, grounded in motivational psychology, behavioral decision research, and 30 years of operational reality.
That depth came from a deliberate choice. After building his career from general laborer on a machine shop floor through General Manager and COO roles across manufacturing, aerospace, oil & gas, and professional services, Brian structured his work across 12+ organizations rather than take the next single-company executive role. The goal: compress what would otherwise take decades into years of intensive pattern recognition. Problems that look unique inside one company reveal themselves as recurring patterns when you've seen them across a dozen.
The result is a methodology most executives don't develop — the ability to orient quickly, diagnose accurately without insider assumptions, and lead effectively regardless of context. Enterprise valuation improvements of 50–150% across the client portfolio. Production constraints traced to their actual source. Manufacturers restructured to run without the owner in every room.
Brian holds a BS in Mechanical Engineering and an MBA, and is a CEPA-certified exit planning advisor and CMAA-certified M&A Advisor (Alliance of Mergers & Acquisition Advisors). He works with manufacturing and industrial business owners in the $3M–$100M range who are scaling, preparing for a transition, or ready to build something that outlasts them.
Working Genius - Invention & Wonder
Cultural Index - Rainmaker, Predictive Index: Maverick
CliftonStrengths - Ideation, Futuristic, Relator, Learner, Strategic
Local to the Houston Texas Metropolitan Region and Remotely throughout the US
Jenny Kemper
Chief Operating Officer
Fractional COO | Fractional Integrator | Operations Coach
Jenny believes the fastest path to execution runs through people — not processes.
She brings more than 20 years of experience helping founder-led organizations turn vision into momentum. Her entry point is always the team: how they're aligned, where the friction lives, and what's getting in the way of the people who already want to do great work. From there, she builds the structure and accountability that lets them move faster — together.
Where others see organizational chaos, Jenny sees a pattern. Her natural ability to read people, build trust quickly, and identify what actually matters in a room has made her the kind of operator that leadership teams open up to — and follow. She doesn't impose a system on a culture. She meets it where it is and builds from there.
Jenny works with founders who are tired of being the ceiling of their own organization — leaders who have the right people but need someone to help them stop reacting and start executing. Her engagements leave behind stronger teams, cleaner accountability, and leaders who've rediscovered the freedom that made them start the business in the first place.
Working Genius: Tenacity & Discernment
Culture Index: Architect
Local to the Cleveland Ohio Region, Remotely throughout the US
Erick Garcia
Chief People Officer
Fractional COO | Fractional CEO | Fractional Integrator | EOS Advisor
Erick knows that most operational problems are people problems in disguise.
In 15+ years working with founders, CEOs, and executive teams across the U.S. and Latin America, he's found that the gap between a company's strategy and its results almost always traces back to organizational structure, leadership capability, or accountability systems that weren't built to scale. His job is to close that gap — by getting the right people in the right structure, with the right systems underneath them.
Erick's background is in building organizations from the inside out. He's scaled a startup from two employees to a fully structured company with 15–17x revenue growth, grown a service business into a five-division market leader with a successful buyout, and executed a full operational turnaround of an oil & gas fabricator — redesigning staffing models, overhauling financial systems, and embedding EOS-driven accountability from the ground up. He has also served as a board advisor for a $265M tier-1 auto parts manufacturer and a 20-subsidiary family office in Mexico.
What makes Erick distinctive is his ability to operate at both altitude and ground level — designing organizational architecture one day and sitting with a leadership team to untangle a people dynamic the next. He brings fluency in EOS implementation, cross-functional alignment, and the kind of financial discipline that makes growth sustainable rather than chaotic.
At NextStage, Erick leads the people and organizational strategy dimension of our engagements — ensuring that when we build a business that runs without the owner, it runs because the team is genuinely capable, not just temporarily managed.
Working Genius: Discernment and Galvanizing
Local to the Houston Texas Metropolitan Region and Remotely throughout the US , Mexico and South America