I help health and medical tech companies ensure adoption and lasting impact by translating complex technology into clear value for clinicians, administrators, and patients.

𝗬𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗯𝗲𝘀𝘁 𝗰𝗹𝗶𝗲𝗻𝘁𝘀 𝘄𝗮𝗻𝘁 𝗮 𝘁𝗿𝘂𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝗮𝗱𝘃𝗶𝘀𝗼𝗿, 𝗻𝗼𝘁 𝗷𝘂𝘀𝘁 𝗮 𝘃𝗲𝗻𝗱𝗼𝗿.

They want strategic partnerships that drive measurable outcomes, proactive relationship management that anticipates their needs, and data-driven insights that influence their business decisions.

That's what I deliver as a Client Success Manager by:

🎯 Driving revenue growth through strategic account management and expansion initiatives 
📊 Leveraging data storytelling to make compelling recommendations that influence stakeholder decisions
🤝 Building trusted advisor relationships at all organizational levels through active listening and stakeholder-focused communication

I was inspired to focus on client success after overcoming two malignant brain tumors at 15, learning what's possible when teams align around common goals with clear communication and mutual support. 

This experience shaped my approach to:

Strategic relationship building - I connect clients with network resources beyond my scope, becoming their go-to trusted advisor for business challenges.

Cross-functional collaboration - I excel at facilitating communication between departments, ensuring seamless client experiences while keeping projects on budget and timeline.

Proactive account management - I treat challenges as opportunities, using analytical skills to identify solutions before they become problems. (Pivoted a critical La Familia anti-Fentanyl campaign after major stakeholder departure, leading cross-functional teams to successful regionwide deployment.)

Product expertise and translation - I absorb complex technical knowledge and translate it into revenue-driving outcomes for diverse decision-makers. (Helped Enovix distill 45-minute technical explanations into compelling 2-minute stories, supporting their $1.13B SPAC and $250M Army contract.)

Client retention and satisfaction - I genuinely celebrate when stakeholder connections I facilitate lead to breakthrough partnerships and business wins.

I host The Human Connection Podcast, exploring how companies build high-retention relationships that drive sustainable growth. (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-human-connection-podcast/id1789888599)

Ready to discuss how I can drive client satisfaction, retention, and revenue growth for your team? Email kpontau@gmail.com or send a DM. 

Let's connect!

Karl Pontau

This actually matters.

Men -- including myself -- need to step up and demand accountability from those in power. 

Thanks to Natalie Charles, PMP for tagging me.

#Justice #Accountability

Former Founder Who Gets Client Struggles | Client Success | 19x Adoption Growth | Human Connection Nerd | Seeking CSM Roles 🧠

Senior Operations Leader | Embracing Unwavering Execution & Extreme Ownership Principles

I help organizations cut through complexity and turn operations into systems they can count on. With 20 years of experience, I have led cross-functional teams, managed a $200M contract portfolio, and delivered measurable results:

- $22M in savings through vendor management and strategic sourcing
- 25% profit margin gains through process improvement and operational efficiency
- 200+ corporate and endurance events produced over 15 years
- Large-scale budgets and project management across multiple functions

Core strengths: operations leadership, vendor management, contract management, strategic sourcing, process improvement, project management, budgeting, and event direction. I combine data-driven execution with a servant-leadership style shaped by Extreme Ownership and Echelon Front principles.

Outside of work, I am a runner, ultrarunner, GoRucker, and adventurer. The resilience and grit built on the trail inform every decision I make.

If you are looking for an operations partner who can optimize processes, manage vendors, and deliver events with measurable results, let’s connect.

“Jimmy’s integrity, bias toward action, and laser focus allowed our organization to scale…from the red into the black < 1 year, scaling >10X.” – Anoop Grover, COO

Jimmy Gabany

Most communication problems are not content problems.

They are leadership problems.

You can be right and still lose the room.

I have watched solid ideas get rejected because the tone was off. I have seen good feedback land wrong because it was delivered at the worst possible moment. I have done it myself. The message was fine. The timing was not.

Tact matters because respect matters. Tone matters because people read emotion before logic. Delivery matters because confidence and humility have to show up together. Timing matters because even the best point will fail if the person hearing it is not ready.

If you want alignment, slow down before you speak.

Ask yourself:

Is this the right moment?
Is my tone matching my intent?
Am I trying to win, or am I trying to solve?

Strong leaders do not just manage what they say. They manage how and when they say it.

That is where trust is built or lost.

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Extreme Ownership Muster 023

The OODA Loop

The Indirect Approach

Extreme Ownership Framework

Barriers to Extreme Ownership

 Creating a Culture of Extreme Ownership

How to Navigate Micromanagement

CSCMP Supply Chain Foundations: The Essentials Professional Certificate

Certified Ultrarunning Coach

Change Management Professional Certificate by LinkedIn Learning

ServiceNow IT Leadership Professional Certificate

Negotiation Professional Certificate by American Negotiation Institute

The Debrief

Global Procurement and Sourcing Specialization

Google Project Management Certificate

The Readback

EOS® Integrator™️ Masterclass Graduate

Extreme Ownership Muster 016

Safety and Risk Mitigation

Dichotomy of Leadership Foundation Course

Extreme Ownership Foundation Course

Technical Support Fundamentals

USSF D License

RRCA Certified Coach

USATF Level 1 Coach

NASM PES

NASM CPT

Metabolic Efficiency Training Specialist

Schwinn Cycling Instructor

Extreme Networks, Inc. (EXTR) is a leader in AI-powered cloud networking, delivering a unified platform that simplifies and secures IT operations. Our solutions help businesses address challenges and enable connections among devices, applications, and users. We push the boundaries of technology, leveraging the powers of artificial intelligence, analytics, and automation. Trusted by thousands of customers globally, our AI-powered cloud networking solutions and industry-leading support enable businesses to drive value, foster innovation, and overcome extreme challenges.

For more information, visit Extreme's website at www.extremenetworks.com or follow us on LinkedIn, YouTube, X/Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.

The function didn't exist before I got there. Engineers were running their own contracts. Procurement wasn't in the room. Nobody owned the vendor relationships, the risk, or the outcomes.

I changed that. Built the operating system, the governance framework, and the accountability structure from nothing. I drive alignment across Finance, Legal, Procurement, InfoSec, and Insurance with no direct authority and no missed outcomes. Five stakeholder groups. Zero excuses.

The results: $200M+ portfolio under management, $22M+ in delivered savings, and contract cycle time cut from six weeks to three. AI-enabled workflows helped. Knowing what I needed before I walked into any negotiation helped more.

Senior Manager, Product Operations

Running B2B events at the executive level sounds straightforward until you're coordinating production across the U.S. and Europe, managing sponsors with six-figure commitments, and accountable to attendees who paid to be in the room.

Small core team. High standards. No margin for visible failure.

Margins up 25%. Vendor costs down 25%. Sponsorship revenue up 35%. CSAT above 95%.

In events, the product is the experience. If the experience breaks, everything breaks. It hasn't.

Event Director

Built the operating model from nothing. Repeatable systems, budget ownership, vendor strategy, and the rhythm that kept multi-location events from turning into chaos. Set the standard the Event Director role runs on today.

Head of Operations / COO

Running a business for 17 years alongside full-time executive roles isn't a side hustle. It's proof of capacity.

I built Elemental as an endurance athlete and coach because I understood the problem from the inside. That's still true. When you're timing 800 athletes at 5am on a mountain, everyone on the crew knows their job, owns their piece, and doesn't wait to be told what to do when something goes sideways. That's not an accident. That's the standard I set.

200+ road, trail, and track events. 99% timing accuracy. 30+ events a year. Clients come back because we show up and get it right.

Founder

Nevada's cannabis market expansion was the Wild West. New regulations, high stakes, no playbook.

I ran operations through all of it. Team of up to 200 people. Rapidly scaling, heavily regulated environment where hiring fast without lowering the bar wasn't optional, it was the job. I built the leaders inside the org who carried the standard when I couldn't be in the room.

Scaled wholesale more than 10x. Grew revenue 50%. Maintained less than 0.1% inventory variance across multimillion-dollar stock throughout the entire growth cycle. Managed capital projects from $10M to $50M including full facility builds and operational expansion.

One compliance miss could have shut the business down. Nothing did.

Head of Operations / General Manager

Fortune 500 clients. MGM properties. High-profile events where visible failure wasn't an option and nobody got to have a bad day when the client was watching.

15+ multimillion-dollar events. Production teams of 50+ per event. On time, on budget, 95%+ client satisfaction. We got called back.

Event Manager

SageWater specializes in large-scale residential repipe and rehab. I ran operations across 2,000+ projects in Nevada with crews and staff of 50+ running dozens of concurrent jobs at any given time.

Leading in high-volume construction means setting a standard and then building the supervisors and crew leads who carry it without you standing over them. You can't be on every job site. You build people who don't need you to be.

Senior Project Manager

Combat Engineer. Logistics Technician. Armorer. Schweinfurt, Germany.

I managed equipment ordering and supply chain for an armored unit, owned weapons accountability for the unit, and led soldiers in a zero-failure environment. Leadership in the Army isn't theoretical. You set the standard, you model it, and your people either meet it or they don't. There's no gray area.

It's where the standard got set.

Combat Engineer

Operations Leader | I Build the Systems That Keep Companies From Falling Apart | Extreme Ownership | Vendor Strategy | Event Execution

Strong leaders admit when they do not know.

Not because it sounds humble. Because it is efficient.

Pretending to have every answer slows the room down. People wait. They defer. They hold back ideas because they assume the leader already decided.

The moment you say, “I don’t know,” something shifts. The team leans in. Ownership spreads. Solutions get better.

Needing help is not weakness. It is awareness.

If you are the smartest voice in every conversation, you are probably talking too much.

I got a new tattoo last month.

Jocko's GOOD. Right on my forearm, where I see it every day.

It is going to grow. Eventually, it will include the end of that same piece:
"Get up, dust off, re-load, re-calibrate, re-engage. And go out on the attack."

People will ask why. Here is the honest answer.

It is too easy to slip into the negative. Things break. Plans fail. Races go sideways. Deals fall apart. The world will give you plenty of reasons to focus on what went wrong.

GOOD forces an interruption. The computer dies mid-race. Good. I already have a backup running. The event hits a wall. Good. Now I know exactly where the weak point is. The plan falls apart. Good. The plan was probably wrong anyway. The negotiation went sideways. Good. I learned a better technique.

This is not optimism. It is a discipline. And like any discipline, it has to be practiced until it becomes automatic.

That is why it is on my arm.

Because some days I need the reminder before my brain goes somewhere less useful.

As a leader, your mindset is contagious. If you spiral, the room spirals. If you reset and move, the room moves with you.

GOOD is the reset.

#leadership #operations

50 plus pounds on my back. 75 minutes. Pavement.

Dragging that kind of weight around is not fun. I want to be clear about that. Nobody is out here loving every step of a ruck. You just do it anyway.

This is prep for the Ruck Race League March Challenge. 25 percent of bodyweight for 75 minutes. The Furnace. It is exactly what it sounds like.

I do it because discipline equals freedom. And because I cannot ask anything of my team, my family, or anyone in my chain of command that I am not willing to demand of myself first.

Here is the controversial part.

If you cannot lead yourself, you are not a leader. You might be a manager. You might be in charge. But leadership requires something more than a title or authority. It requires that the people around you actually want to follow you.

That starts with how you show up when nobody is watching. The early morning. The extra weight. The thing you do not want to do but are committed to anyway.

People are paying attention even when you think they are not. They are watching whether your standards apply to you or just to them.

Be the person people choose to follow.

Not because they have to. Because they want to.

#leadership

It has been a while since I have actually run.

Torn quad in December took care of that. No regrets, though. It is not every day you get to play laser tag supervised by Navy SEALs/SpecOps guys.

Today, it is one foot in front of the other. No fanfare. No applause. Just moving.

That is how most things worth doing actually get done. Not with a grand moment or a perfect starting point. Just a decision to start and the discipline to keep going.

Dean Karnazes said it best.
"Run when you can, walk if you have to, crawl if you must. Just never give up."

That applies well beyond running.

Whatever you are working through right now, just keep moving forward.

#leadership

This is my amazing wife, Sandy.

New Year's Eve. End of her first 100 miler.

She did not finish because she felt good. She finished because she refused to stop.

Blisters. Aches. The kind of tired that sits in your bones and starts negotiating with your brain around mile 60. Every step after that is a choice. Not a physical one. A mental one.

The body will lie to you. It will tell you that you have nothing left. That stopping is reasonable. That you have already done enough.

Discipline is knowing the difference between actually done and just uncomfortable.

Sandy knows the difference.

I have watched a lot of people train for events like this. The ones who finish are not always the most fit. They are the ones who learned to keep moving when every reasonable thought says stop.

That lesson does not stay on the trail. It follows you into every hard thing after.

Grit is not something you have. It is something you practice until quitting stops feeling like an option.

She rang that bell.

#leadership #operations

5,000 people. Wilmington. Last weekend.

My primary timing computer died mid-race.

First instinct is to react. Fix it fast, fix it loud, let the stress show. That instinct is wrong.

Detachment is not distance. It is discipline. You pull back just far enough to see the problem clearly without your emotions making it worse. Then you act.

I switched to the backup that was already running. Results slowed. The primary timing company stressed. I stayed calm, kept the team steady, and fixed it.

Nobody on that course knew anything went wrong.

That is what Echelon Front means by detachment in practice. Not checked out. Not cold. Just controlled enough to respond instead of react when something breaks in front of a crowd.

The job is not set up. The job is what happens when it breaks.

#leadership #operations

"A leader is best when people barely know he exists. When his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves."
Lao Tzu
This has always been my goal.

Not the applause. Not the credit. Not the moment where everyone looks over and acknowledges how much you contributed.

The satisfaction comes from watching the mission get accomplished. From seeing people solve problems you used to have to solve for them. From knowing the system runs because you built it right, not because you are standing over it.

Honestly? Getting paid helps too. HAHA.

But the real measure is when the team walks away feeling like they did it. Because in the best cases, they did. You just made sure the conditions were right for that to happen.

That is harder than it sounds. Ego wants recognition. It wants people to know. Letting the work speak without attaching your name to it takes discipline.

The leaders I respect most are the ones you only notice when they are gone. Suddenly things are harder. Decisions take longer. The room is louder and less focused.

That absence tells you more about their leadership than anything they ever said about themselves.

Build it. Execute it. Get out of the way.

#leadership

Nobody has ever left a meeting thinking "I wish that had been longer."

Corporate culture did not collapse overnight. It drifted.

One small compromise at a time. A missed conversation here. An ignored signal there. A push for output without a pause to ask what it is costing the people doing the work. Over time, that drift becomes the new normal.

There was a time when steady leadership and earned loyalty were not buzzwords. Managers knew their teams. Expectations were firm. Respect was mutual. If something went wrong, it was addressed directly. If someone did well, it was recognized without being turned into a campaign.

Now, too many environments feel transactional. People are treated like interchangeable parts. Pressure flows downhill. Recognition flows upward. Leaders talk about culture while quietly rewarding behavior that undermines it.

If you want to change the trajectory, start with yourself. Keep your word even when it is inconvenient. Set standards and hold them without shifting them to fit the mood. Protect your team when the pressure rises instead of using them as insulation.

Loyalty is not a perk. It is a response to consistent behavior. When people feel respected and treated fairly, they commit. When they feel used, they disengage.

Culture is not what you declare. It is what you tolerate and reinforce every day.

Timing in the mud and rain!

Elemental Race Timing

Elemental Race Timing

Detachment is not distance. It is discipline.

At Echelon Front, detachment means stepping back far enough to see what you cannot see when you are in the middle of it.

When you are too close, everything feels urgent. Every issue looks personal. Emotions rise. Decisions get reactive.

Detachment creates space. You pull back. You assess. You ask what actually matters right now. The problem often looks different from ten thousand feet.

I have had moments where staying in the weeds felt responsible. It was not. It made me slower and more emotional. The solution did not show up until I paused and looked at the situation without ego attached.

Detachment is not cold. It is controlled. It is choosing to respond instead of react.

If things feel chaotic, you might not need more effort. You might need more perspective.

"The function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers."
Ralph Nader

If your only goal is to create followers, that is an ego problem.

Great leaders raise people up without worrying about being outgrown. They share what they know. They put people in positions to succeed. They celebrate when someone they developed moves past them.

Being part of the process that makes someone better than you says more about your leadership than any title or follower count ever will.
I have seen leaders hoard knowledge because they were afraid of being replaced. That is not leadership. That is insecurity with a job title.

The best leaders I have been around made themselves less necessary over time. Not because they checked out, but because they built people who did not need them for the basics anymore.

That is the goal.

If everyone around you is dependent on you for answers, you have built a following. If everyone around you is solving problems, growing, and pushing past where you found them, you have done the job.

One of those is leadership. The other just feels like it.

#leadership

Today I am cleaning up a mess that did not have to happen.

Someone went around the team. Skipped the people who could have helped. Made the move that looked good for them in the moment and left the wreckage for everyone else to deal with.

This is not a skill problem. It is a character problem.

Teams exist because no single person has every answer. Using your teammates is not a sign of weakness. It is how the work actually gets done without creating casualties along the way.

The people who go around the team are usually optimizing for how they look, not for the outcome. And it works, right up until someone has to come behind them and fix what they left.

I do not mind doing the work. That is part of the job.

What I mind is that it was completely avoidable.

Use your team. Ask for help. Let people do what they are there to do. The mission matters more than the moment you get to look like you handled it alone.

Do not be this person.

#leadership #operations

Meetings are not work.

They are either alignment or avoidance.

If you leave without a decision, an owner, and a next action, it was not productive. It was theater.

Fewer meetings.
More ownership.
Finish things.

Caught up with Kipp Sorensen a couple of days ago after way too long. The last time was in Nashville in January of 2018.

We picked it up quickly. Leadership. Life. The stuff that actually matters between people who think the same way about both.

Those conversations do not happen enough.

The older I get, the more I realize that finding people who share your values and your outlook is rare. Hanging onto them is a discipline.

Leadership can be isolating. Having people in your corner who actually get it matters more than most leaders want to admit.

Reach out to someone you have not talked to in too long.

Today. Not someday.

#leadership

Former Chief People Officer | Executive Leadership Coach | Helping leaders LEAD Stronger so Teams Win | Order of Man Podcast | Jiu-Jitsu Black Belt ⬛⬛🟥⬛

Leadership is not a title. It is a ripple effect.

If the people around you are thinking bigger because of your example, that is leadership. If they are pushing themselves to learn more, take on more responsibility, and raise their standards, that says more than any promotion ever will.

I have worked for leaders who talked about vision all day. Few inspired it. The ones who did were consistent. They showed up prepared. They admitted mistakes. They held the line when standards slipped. You did not just hear what they believed. You saw it.

Inspiration is not hype. It is modeling.

If your team is growing, stretching, and stepping into more than they thought they could handle, you are doing the job.

If they are shrinking, playing it safe, or waiting to be told what to do, something needs to change.

Leadership is measured in who people become because you were in the room.

Telewealth Miami 2026 was another amazing GeekOut event in Miami. 

Great content, amazing network, killer location.

The org chart says one person is in charge.

The group chat tells a different story.

Sandra Smith gives an in-depth look at the practices and processes of traditional publishing. If you’re writing a book and considering going the trad route, this one’s for you.

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Jimmy Gabany

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The Battle

Karl Pontau

Jimmy Gabany

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