About
Better organizations begin with better leadership.
Capitalus Consulting was founded on a simple belief:
People aren't here to provide leaders with a position. Leaders are in a position to provide people with leadership.
Leadership is a responsibility. The way leaders make decisions, set expectations, and treat people shapes how managers manage, how employees experience their work, what the culture becomes, and ultimately how the organization performs.
Why Capitalus exists
By the time most leaders look for outside help, they've already tried to solve the problem. They've hired, introduced new processes, invested in technology, updated policies, developed managers, reorganized, or taken performance action.
Sometimes those solutions work.
Sometimes the problem returns.
Organizations can spend enormous amounts of energy changing what they believe is causing the problem without first testing whether that belief is correct.
Sometimes the problem really is the employee. Sometimes it's the manager, the process, the structure, the technology, a gap in capability, or the system people work within. And sometimes it's leadership's own assumptions, decisions, or behaviors.
Capitalus exists to find out which—before more time, money, and trust are spent on the wrong answer.
Meet the Founder
Chris Akes
Founder, Capitalus Consulting Partners
Chris founded Capitalus after a 17-year career that began on the front line and progressed through supervision, management, human resources, HR leadership, and strategic partnership with business leaders.
That career includes supervising a team of 17 customer service representatives and leading new-hire on-the-job training; managing supervisors who were each responsible for frontline teams, with responsibility for developing new leaders; and, as HR Manager, leading HR operations across three sites.
At the largest point of that HR footprint, Chris supported approximately 3,400 employees across three locations. As a Lead Consultant HR Business Partner, the work extended to strategic support for business leadership, executive coaching and leadership guidance, and partnership on organizational and business growth.
Along the way, Chris participated in and led significant organizational change—including work related to a global transition from paper-based processes to digital operations.
This isn't simply 17 years in HR. It's experience seeing organizations from the inside out.
- Customer Service Representative
- Supervisor
- Manager
- HR Specialist
- Senior HR Specialist
- HR Manager
- Lead Consultant HR Business Partner
- Founder, Capitalus Consulting
I've seen organizations from both sides of the conversation.
I've been the employee expected to carry out decisions made elsewhere. The supervisor responsible for a team. The manager responsible for other leaders. The HR professional dealing with the organizational consequences of decisions. And the strategic partner working with business leaders on what the organization should do next.
Each of those positions sees the same problem differently—and each is usually partly right. The explanation that seems obvious from one level often looks very different from another.
The responsibility is to find out before acting.
The work has always been about people.
What I'm proudest of from my career isn't a project or a title. It's the people who grew into leaders. The teams that became healthier. The leaders who learned to see their organizations differently. The workplaces that became better places to work.
I believe one better leader can affect far more than a single engagement. Better leaders shape better teams. Those teams affect employees, and employees take their work home to their families and communities. The impact of a leader reaches lives well beyond the walls of the organization.
What Capitalus believes
- Leadership is a responsibility, not a privilege.
- Understanding comes before prescription.
- Leaders should be willing to examine themselves.
- Evidence should be able to change our minds.
- Clients retain ownership.
- Consulting should build capability—not dependency.
What we're building
Capitalus is a young firm, and we're open about that. It is being built around a disciplined organizational consulting methodology—the Capitalus Method—rather than around one consultant having all the answers.
The Method creates a common standard for how problems are understood, investigated, and resolved. As Capitalus grows, that standard is what will allow additional expertise and consultants to join the work while keeping the same rigor clients experience today.
Building Capital Through People
Capital isn't only financial. Organizations create value through the capability of their people, the quality of their leadership, the strength of their systems, and their ability to operate effectively together.
That's the capital Capitalus helps organizations build.
What keeps anchoring you to the business?
If the same problems keep coming back to you, let's find out why.