Oakes Consulting
About
I will be with you through all of it.
Side by side, the whole way. Asking the questions underneath the ones you came in with, helping you see it from outside your own walls, and still here when your team takes it over.
Ryan Oakes, PhD
My doctorate is in industrial and organizational psychology, from Northcentral University. I spent about twenty years running programs, building systems, and working in data and analytics inside large organizations. A lot of it landed in the gap between what leadership decided and what the people doing the work could actually execute.
Most of that was in large, regulated environments, where a process that only exists on paper costs real money and carries real risk. Across every industry I have worked in, it is nearly always the same problem underneath: the work has outgrown the way it is being run.
My education and twenty years of work experience do different jobs, and I would not want to work without either. Plenty of people have the experience and never got the grounding. Plenty have the grounding and never had to ship anything. The psychology is why I look at the people before the process, because a process nobody follows is not a process, and that is where this work usually breaks down.
The truth is you have not done anything wrong
Almost nobody I meet is short on vision, or on effort. They are stuck on the structure underneath it, and that is genuinely hard to fix from the inside. If you have spent a couple of years starting things that never quite catch, that is not a failure of will. It is a problem with a shape, and it can be solved.
Most people already know roughly what they want. What they need is help organizing it, simplifying it, and getting it to actually run. So I work alongside you rather than handing down a verdict from the outside. You get honest feedback, including the parts that are uncomfortable, and then we build it together.
Consultant is only half of it
A consultant hands you a recommendation and leaves you to it. An advisor sits with you while you decide, and is still there while it gets built. I would rather be the second one.
The honest reason this firm exists
I accepted Christ at a very young age. In my late twenties I stopped really practicing, and about fifteen years went by like that. I still believed. I simply was not present. After my mom passed in December of 2025 I found my way back into a church, and something caught. It has not let up since.
I had wanted to consult for a long time before any of that, and it is why I went back for the doctorate. I graduated in 2020, opened Oakes Consulting in 2021, and nothing came of it. It closed inside a year. I let the idea go.
Years later I was praying about whether to pick that name back up or start again with something new. Around the same time, someone praying over me kept getting the same phrase: rising from the ashes. I went looking for where that sat in scripture, and found this.
“To grant to those who mourn in Zion, to give them beauty for ashes … that they may be called oaks of righteousness, the planting of the Lord, that he may be glorified.”Isaiah 61:3
Ashes and oaks, one verse, with my surname sitting in the middle of it. I took it as confirmation, and I picked the name back up. So this is not a practice I built and then attached a faith to. I know I am being led through it, and any part of it that works is His rather than mine.
Worth a conversation?
If you think there is even a chance I could help, let's talk. No pressure and no expectations, on either side. We will work out together whether it is a fit, and it has to be a fit for both of us.