Built by two people who spent their careers finding what's broken inside businesses.

Why we built this

We don't like all the waste it historically takes to get quality business advice. So we built VIA-Business as a low-cost way to deliver what we call "consulting in a box" — our effort to level the playing field and improve the odds for people building or growing a business.

Our experience pointed to one recurring, avoidable source of that waste: not knowing — the moment a leader realizes, too late, "I didn't know that I didn't know that." We built an accessible, affordable, self-service diagnostic to surface exactly that kind of blind spot before it becomes expensive.

We'll gladly stand VIA-Business up against any other business consulting option on the market, on three things:

• Faster — there's little else out there that surfaces real answers about your business this quickly.
• Better — recommendations grounded in established business practice, applied consistently and without the bias a single consultant brings.
• Cheaper — try finding this level of customized, structured recommendation at this price anywhere else.

A bit of history

Both founders spent their early careers inside what is today a Fortune 20 company, where a strategic decision could mobilize enormous amounts of money, time, and people almost overnight. That environment produced serious discipline around identifying and eliminating waste in large, siloed operations — and it's where both of us learned to see it.

Across both careers — sometimes in the same department, sometimes in different ones — we brought a lean, agile lens to how work actually gets done. Call it a flaw or a feature: we can't help looking for the faster, better, less expensive way to do something, in our own work and in helping others do theirs.

It sounds like a clever way to advertise delegating work. It's really a philosophy: the people actually doing the work have skin in the game, understand their own challenges better than an outsider walking in cold, and deserve the credit when they fix something — even with a little help along the way.

After a combined fifty years in that world, we moved into external lean consulting and ran into the same problem from the other side: wildly inconsistent deliverables across the consulting industry, and a shortage of internal resources at the organizations that needed help most. That gap is what VIA-Business was built to close.

Meet the founders

Mark Jepperson

Co-Founder

Mark spent over 30 years inside one company that went through repeated mergers and acquisitions — Hughes Aircraft, General Dynamics, Raytheon — landing him at the front of nearly every organizational transformation, process change, and culture shift along the way. His pattern: land in a role, make it better, equip others to sustain it, then move to the next challenge.

"There is always a path forward, but not everyone is ready for it in that moment" is a line he's known for. He's especially good at taking a tangled, total picture of what's happening and turning it into a simple, actionable pattern.

• Certified Raytheon Six Sigma (Lean) Expert
• Master's in Business Administration; Bachelor of Architecture
• Co-creator of the Manufacturing Excellence Model — winner of two Shingo Prizes for excellence in manufacturing and lean
• Chief Learning Officer, Raytheon Tucson site
• Inventor of FASTPERT, an integration of FAST and PERT project methods
• Founded Working Change LLC in 2012; later co-founded Vector Reports

Steve Harvey

Co-Founder

Steve's strength is working behind the scenes — researching and designing training and systems that align business and worker goals around a single motto he's carried his whole career: "Provide fast, friendly, efficient self-service." He believes people should get credit for the changes they make at work, even when the seed of the idea came from someone else.

He gravitated naturally into change initiatives across manufacturing and supply chain, and considers his years at Hughes Aircraft and Raytheon Missile Systems the equivalent of a PhD in learning systems and organizational development, minus the tuition.

• Raytheon Six Sigma certified Expert
• Graduate degrees in Organizational Management and Business Administration
• Co-creator of the Manufacturing Excellence Model — winner of two Shingo Prizes
• Built the workforce transition certification program with Georgia's Department of Economic Development
• Member of the team that created the Hughes Aircraft Agile Manufacturing Initiative
• Founded Steve Harvey Consulting LLC; later co-founded Vector Reports

We are change agents

Both of us hold MBAs and share the same core values: lifelong learning, a genuine dislike of waste, and a belief that real value beats a polished pitch. We built those values into a diagnostic system meant to give small business leaders the insight to grow their business into what they actually set out to build — without first spending a fortune on consultants, coaches, or education just to learn the vocabulary well enough to ask the right questions.

You might find you can make some of these improvements yourself. Or, at minimum, you'll know exactly what kind of help to ask for next.

We couldn't even write this page without demonstrating the self-service difference we're trying to bring to your business.