Founders

We don’t like all the waste it historically takes when seeking quality business advice; so we created Vector Reports and its planned VIA· full-suite of assessments as a vehicle to design and deliver low-cost virtual “consulting services in a box“. It is our effort to level the playing field, increase the likelihood of success, and make a difference for the people associated with the new or growing business endeavor.

Our research and experience showed that the largest source of waste in the business development process was the condition of not knowing—encountering the shocked exclamation: “I didn’t know that I didn’t know that.”

We set out to fix that by designing an accessible, affordable, online, easy-to-use, tool to identify and describe what is often unknown to the people doing the work so it can be acted upon. As you search the market for other sources of in-person or virtual business consulting help, we welcome comparisons of our VIA·Business diagnostic with any of them. We challenge you to find any other assistance that is:

• Faster—there is little out there that can surface unknowns and give you business consulting answers as fast;
• Better—recommendations are based in solid business practices, but are designed into a system that is balanced to address priorities (unemotionally, rationally, and consistently);
• Cheaper—good luck trying to find this national-class level of recommendations that are customized to your specific situation and status for the price.

Our goal is to help you increase your likelihood of business success, quickly, affordably, with quality similar to professional consultants, but with a broader system of processes being considered.

Often, for much less than the price of a typical consultant’s round-trip plane ticket, plus about an hour of your time, the assessment asks you critical questions about your business, analyzes it based on generally accepted business principles and our algorithm, and delivers a written set of prioritized recommendations to guide improvement efforts on your vulnerable business processes.

Imbedded into our diagnostic process is our intention to help find and encourage untapped talent already within your organization who could make a difference.

The Vector Reports founders were fortunate to have had their early careers in what is today a Fortune 20 company. Every day the population of a small city would enter the security gates into a challenging and rewarding work environment. Typically, once a strategic direction was established, large amounts of money, time, and human resources would be unleashed to make it happen.

In this atmosphere of immense resource consumption, programs evolved to identify, simplify, reduce and eliminate systemic waste that can arise and accumulate in large siloed operations. Within those corporate-wide change-management initiatives our founders flourished.

Founder background in process waste reduction

Throughout both their careers, sometimes working together, sometimes in different departments, they have brought a lean and agile perspective to the activities of work and living life. It may be a flaw or a feature, but both find themselves operating to find the faster, better, less expensive way to perform tasks and create success—in their own work, and helping others to do the same.

There was a sign in one founder’s office that read, 

“We specialize in Fast, Friendly, Efficient, Self-service!” 

While that may seem like simply a clever way to advertise delegation of work, what it really means is a philosophy of understanding that individuals and teams who are actually doing the work have skin in the game and should get the credit for their improvements even if they need a little help along the way. They know more about the effects of their challenges than someone from the outside coming in to tell them what they probably already know.

After a combined fifty years in that industry, they continued their commitment as external lean consultants in the “real” world and found a lack of standardization in the deliverables from the consulting fields as well as a lack of available internal resources within the organizations that needed help the most.

Making discoveries

Our founders witnessed that one or two things typically occur in a team when a big challenge becomes evident to individuals. Those individuals either:

• … become too busy solving the problems of the moment to see the bigger problem lurking just ahead, or
• … focus on lesser priorities that they feel they have more control over (usually unintendedly making less of a difference)

Neither of those behaviors lead to change—they only preserve the status quo.

When our founders recognized these same behaviors and outcomes in the business world, they incorporated their knowledge and values of “fast, efficient, self-service” into their diagnostic tools. You can now use their accumulated wisdom by using the VIA·Business assessment. This will help you quickly identify and prioritize the right problems to be corrected.

Both founders hold MBAs and share many personal values. They both participate in lifelong learning, enjoy helping others succeed, insist on delivering real value to their customers, and dislike waste and unnecessary cost.

They built their values and philosophy into a diagnostic system to serve small business leaders. Their work and goal is to provide you insight and information to grow your business into the successful entity you had in mind when you formed it.

And to do so without spending a lot of money and time on consultants, education, coaches, or other improvement methods without first educating yourself on the vocabulary of the industry, the important issues you will need to find expertise in, and the questions you should be able to ask of those experts.

You just might find you are able to do some of these improvements yourself … or at least after trying, you will know what kind of help to ask for!

See! We can’t even introduce ourselves without demonstrating the “self-service” difference we intend to help you make in your business life!

Mark enjoys the freedom of being able to function in any of several roles, depending upon the circumstances. He is comfortable working with details and equally at ease with activities that make it necessary to understand how the work fits into a larger context. He has always been quick to accept change and often the first to recognize new opportunities within the work environment, and as such has been called upon to support and lead change initiatives throughout his career.

His strength is his ability to grasp and assess total concepts of what is happening and synthesize it to simpler meaning and patterns in creative ways. He has been known to say, “There is always a path forward, but not everyone is ready for it in that moment.” He has a focus on operational realities. You will likely see him translating concepts and processes into actions he and others can personally perform.

His career is hard to reproduce in these current times having spent over 30 years in one company (one that went through several acquisitions and mergers). He has said he experienced two lifetime’s worth of experience given he was always on the forefront of change, new process implementations, organizational transformations, work culture implementations, and mergers.

He has a pattern of landing in a role, making it better, equipping others to sustain it, and then moving on to the next challenge.

Education and Certifications

• Bachelor of Architecture
• Master in Business Administration
• Board Certified and Registered Architect in the State of Arizona (retired)
• Lore® Executive Coach
• Certified Workstyle Pattern® inventory facilitator
• Certified Raytheon Six Sigma (lean) Expert

Experience and Proficiency

• Business capital planner and management
• Business manager in engineering
• Inventor of FASTPERT—an integration of the FAST technique and PERT project methods in group applications
• Implemented the planning process for the transition of General Dynamics to Hughes Aircraft company
• Guidance team member for company work culture redesign
• Support team member in Raytheon’s purchase of Hughes Aircraft Company
• Co-creator of the Manufacturing Excellence Model that led to Raytheon winning two Shingo Prizes for excellence in manufacturing and lean in Arizona and Kentucky.
• Creator and leader for the Program / Performance Excellence Model that addressed whole systems performance improvements tracking
• Chief Learning Officer for Raytheon Tucson site
• Program Excellence leader at Raytheon
• Volunteer implementation team for the 2017 IdeaFunding Day in the TenWest festival
• Speaker at the 1990 Value Analysis conference, and at 2023 IdeaFunding Day on Business Ecosystem development and designs

Somehow he found time in all that work to write books and screenplays.

When he moved out of the corporate environment to offer services as a private consultant he formed Working Change LLC in 2012. He contracted with Strategy1 to implement the Small Business Administration’s Regional Innovation Cluster five-year contract to revitalize the optics and photonics industry in Arizona.

It was during that ecosystem development effort, when he and his business partner (Stephen Harvey) formed a new company called Vector Reports. They identified needed improvements in the current approach to perform business ecosystem development. That effort revealed a niche opportunity which is now being pursued so that small businesses may benefit from their perspective and experience.

He enjoys all the usual things that most people do as well; Sports, hiking, travel, being a grandfather, being a life-long learner, and home projects. But he was a national caliber tennis player and has run across the Grand Canyon four times and was on the cover of Arizona Highways magazine (a long time ago)!

Steve’s strength is operating behind the scenes and researching and designing training materials that align business and worker goals. He developed a motto during his career that he still lives by today: His goal is to “Provide Fast, Friendly, Efficient Self-service.” He believes people should get the credit for what they do at work and changes they make even if the seed of the idea came from another.

He frequently found himself gravitating into a variety of change initiatives in both the manufacturing and supply-chain arenas. He views his capstone career experience at Hughes Aircraft / Raytheon Missile Systems as being paid to learn the equivalent of a PhD in Learning Systems and Organizational Development.

Education and Certifications

• Undergraduate BS degree in Education – minors in math, philosophy and environmental studies (student taught on the Navajo Nation in Arizona)
• Graduate MA degree in Organizational Management
• Graduate MA degree in Business Administration
• Raytheon Six Sigma certified Expert

Experience and Proficiency

• Liaison with Georgia Department of Economic Development (Quick Start) to design and teach certification program to transition agriculture and textile workers into electronic assembly and inspection workforce
• Materially contributed to the design and content of the Career Enrichment Program, a joint collaboration to redefine IAM bargaining unit job descriptions
• Member of internal team that created and implemented the site-wide Hughes Aircraft Agile Manufacturing Initiative
• Team member to transition manufacturing skills following mergers and acquisitions with/by General Motors, General Dynamics and Raytheon
• Member of select internal team that created and clarified Raytheon Six Sigma Expert and Master certification programs
• Co-creator of the Manufacturing Excellence Model that led to Raytheon winning two Shingo Prizes for excellence in manufacturing and lean in Arizona and Kentucky.
• Team member for the creation of the Program / Performance Excellence Model that addressed whole-systems performance improvements.

He started Steve Harvey Consulting LLC (a private consulting practice) and later co-formed Vector Reports (a strategic venture with Working Change LLC) to research and develop a revolutionary diagnostic system for small businesses.

Having lived the past forty years in the Arizona desert, he enjoys studying and designing water harvesting systems and growing arid-climate plants.