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
For fifteen years I have worked with, improved, streamlined and built the systems large organizations run on. I have cut millions in waste, rebuilt processes that could not have stood up to scrutiny, replaced guesswork with forecasting people could plan against, and put in the reporting that let leaders see what was actually happening. Most of it was in large, regulated environments, where a process that only exists on paper costs real money and carries real risk.
A lot of it landed in the gap between what leadership decided and what the people doing the work could actually execute. Across every industry I have worked in, it is nearly always the same thing underneath: the work has outgrown the way it is being run.
My doctorate is in industrial and organizational psychology, from Northcentral University, and I went back for it because I wanted to do this work. The degree and the fifteen years do different jobs, and I would not want to work without either. Plenty of people have the experience and never received the grounding. Plenty have the grounding and never had to ship anything. What the psychology gave me was a way to see my own biases, and to read a situation from somewhere other than my own seat. It 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.
I was not looking for work. I had started going to a church after my mom passed, and I was getting involved again. One of the pastors and I got to know each other over coffee, and at some point he asked what I did. That turned into him asking what I thought about one part of the church he was trying to get in order.
I said yes as a favor. Sitting with it, I could see the problem was not that one part. It ran into policies, communications, workflows, who owned what, and how decisions actually got made. So I said it needed to be looked at across the whole church, and it became that. Somewhere in the middle of it I realized what I was actually doing. This was the work. It was consulting, and it was the thing I had given up on.
So I started praying about whether this was what I was supposed to be doing, and if it was, what to call it. Pick the old name back up, or start again with something more deliberate. Two things arrived separately while I was sitting with that. I had gone looking for whether my own surname carried any weight in scripture, and found oaks of righteousness. Then, in a meeting, someone praying over me kept getting a phrase I had not said out loud: rising from the ashes. When I went to look up where that sat, it was the same verse.
“To grant to those who mourn in Zion, to give them beauty for ashes …Isaiah 61:3
that they may be called oaks of righteousness, the planting of the Lord,
that he may be glorified.”
Ashes and oaks, one verse, with my surname sitting in the middle of it. I did not go looking for that. I took it as confirmation of the name and of the work, and I picked both back up. And it is not only me He is bringing up out of the ashes. It is the hope I had set down, the work I always wanted to do, and this firm itself, which I had already watched fail once when I tried it on my own. 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.
That is my reason for doing this. It is not something you have to share for the work to be useful to you.
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.