Novalis Consulting Group grew out of a previous Educational Leadership Consulting business I started with my wife, Debby. We started with a few local students and grew until we had students, educational leaders, and raving fans across the country. In 2021 we took a contract that brought us from southern California to western NC and north GA. Tucked inside those simple sentences lives a fantastic adventure with heroes, villains, treasures, and unbelievable experiences. I don’t have time and space here to recount the events of the past few years, but it has been quite a ride.

In late 2021, I started pulling together the wisdom of the previous decade into a new business consulting approach. It has taken a couple of years to flesh out the structures. Recently, a friend of mine suggested I formalize our presence with a website and a social media presence. We put up this website so people have a place to send friends and colleagues to connect with us.

Before I was a business consultant, I got a PhD in physics. There’s a misconception that physicists do unbelievably complicated things, but REALLY we simplify things until they can be solved in an uncomplicated way. I had a high energy laser lab with the Navy, and then moved my expertise to a medical university where I worked with an interdisciplinary team to create IP that we developed into our first company. After that I started a leadership development and educational consulting company that we scaled to a national brand. Along the way, we created a product development company. After this I branched out into leadership consulting, and I’ve been doing leadership development since 2021.

We take this complicated beast called a “company” and boil it down to five or six bite-sized pieces so we can understand each piece in a straightforward way. It actually sounds a little boring, but by working to make small improvements in each piece, we can create a 68% increase per year in profits (I got this perspective and many of my best business coaching ideas from my friend David who started Growth Point Coaching Co). 68% may sound like a lot, but when I show you how we do it, you’ll wonder how in can be so simple. Don’t be fooled though, it will take hard work. Simple doesn’t always mean easy, and that’s why I’m here–to help you keep your momentum every week.

My wife Debby still does educational leadership consulting. It turns out that leadership and best practices learning environments are VERY similar. I also got some of my best insights into high functioning teams by watching my wife put together high functioning teams. It turns out that teams dynamics are the same in schools as they are in the biggest businesses–turns out we can fast forward good or bad habits into our business relationships which stem from early experiences of working in teams. However, there are many great studies and examples of high functioning teams and how they work, but even though these great resources exist to teach us how to do better, industry and education still use OLD models of teams that have some major dysfunctions.

The main goal of a high functioning team is to get ALL the brains in the room working together on the same problem while bringing their individual skills and perspectives. Instead, we all have the experience of being in meetings where we’re falling asleep and wondering why we have to sit through such a waste of everyone’s time. In these kinds of meetings, only ONE brain in working, while the rest of the brains in the room are barely functioning. What if I could show you a different way to get ALL the brains in your meetings working together? This is indeed possible, and my wife and I specialize in creating environments where ALL the brains fire up. If this sounds like something you need, reach out for more information to Insight@NovalisConsutlingGroup.com.

–Steve Kurti, aka novalis on this site