ABOUT PACER LEADERSHIP
Built for leaders facing real complexity.
Not for leaders who want faster answers. For leaders who want better thinking.
PACER Leadership grew from the complementary work of its two founders. Rich Tyson spent 36 years coaching CEOs and senior leaders, developing practical models and principles to help them think more clearly, make wiser decisions, and turn those decisions into results. Jared Oates spent more than a decade building a learning technology that served thousands of organizations. PACER brings those two disciplines together: proven leadership architecture, and technology that puts it in front of leaders the moment they need it.
The firm is built on three ideas that reinforce one another. Leadership Architecture gives leaders the principles, models, and thinking processes they use to work through complex challenges. Leadership Efficacy defines the higher standard: helping leaders accomplish meaningful purposes through wise influence while helping others grow. And the PACER methodology puts those ideas to work by helping leaders see more clearly, think more rigorously, decide more wisely, and act more effectively.
THE REASON
At some point, every senior leader faces a challenge that more effort won't solve.
Not because they lack intelligence or experience. But because the situation itself contains competing truths.
Urgency and discipline. Empathy and accountability. Vision and constraint. Stability and change.
You can't resolve these tensions by picking a side. Favor one at the expense of the other, and the leader may solve one problem only to create another. They require a different kind of thinking: the ability to hold competing truths long enough to understand what the situation actually requires.
PACER Leadership was built for those moments.
We help senior leaders identify what is actually in the way, think clearly without oversimplifying, and act decisively without pretending the complexity has disappeared.
That is what leadership efficacy looks like in practice: accomplishing significant purposes through wise influence while helping the people involved grow in the process.
Leadership is formed, not downloaded.
Tension is not a flaw. It is a signal.
Progress comes from disciplined inquiry, not heroic certainty.
Leadership efficacy is the ultimate measure: meaningful purposes accomplished, people strengthened.
THE ORIGIN
This did not begin as a product strategy. It began as a recognition.
Rich Tyson had spent 36 years building a CEO coaching practice one relationship at a time. He had coached leaders through acquisitions and exits, near-failures and turnarounds, hiring mistakes and succession crises. His average client relationship lasted 11 years. Over those decades, recurring principles emerged. They eventually became the models, questions, and disciplined processes that formed his Leadership Architecture.
The coaching worked. But it had an inherent limitation: every client required Rich personally. The models could be taught, but the questioning, judgment, and disciplined thinking they brought to a leadership challenge were largely delivered one conversation at a time. The question became whether Rich's body of work could reach far more leaders without losing what made it valuable.
Jared Oates had spent more than a decade building Niche Academy, a learning platform serving thousands of organizations. Long before he met Rich, he had been studying leadership from a different direction. He had experienced his own failures as a leader and began recognizing a recurring pattern: good leaders pursuing something genuinely worthwhile while neglecting a necessary counterbalance.
He wrote a book about what he was learning. Then he sold his stake in Niche Academy and began looking for a problem worthy of the next decade of his life.
A LinkedIn message connected Rich and Jared.
In their first conversation, they discovered that two bodies of work developed independently, in different industries and across different generations, had arrived at remarkably complementary conclusions. Rich had spent decades developing practical frameworks for helping leaders work through complexity, competing demands, and hard decisions. Jared had been exploring why leadership breaks down when one legitimate priority overwhelms another.
Each had approached the problem from a different direction. They recognized that the work belonged together.
PACER Leadership grew from that recognition.
It brings together two mature bodies of work: Rich's Leadership Architecture, developed through decades with CEOs and leadership teams, and Jared's understanding of how learning technology reaches people at scale. In PACER AI and the Leadership Architect, they create something neither founder could have built alone. Rich's leadership thinking now arrives in the moment a leader actually needs it.
THE PILOT
PACER doesn't ask you to believe the promise. It asks you to test it.
The PACER Leadership Pilot is a focused 90-day engagement with a cohort of five or six leaders. Each works on a real leadership challenge tied to an outcome they already own, using the Leadership Architect in the moments they need it, with support from a certified PACER coach.
The desired outcome is defined at the beginning. Progress is evaluated against what matters to the business, not participation rates, content completed, or satisfaction scores. The standard is something your CEO would recognize as consequential, not simply something L&D can report as activity.
During this stage of PACER's growth, the founders are personally involved in every pilot. And because the desired outcomes are established before the work begins, the final review can answer a more useful question than “Did our leaders like it?”
Did their leadership change what happened next?
If the evidence says yes, PACER will have earned the right to a larger conversation.
The First Outcome Guarantee
We're not asking you to believe PACER works before you've seen what it can do with your own leaders.
At the beginning of the pilot, each leader will identify an outcome they already own. Together, we'll agree on what real progress would look like. If your cohort engages with the PACER process and, after 90 days, you can't see measurable movement toward those outcomes, we'll work with you to make it right.
There is one essential condition: engagement. PACER can strengthen how leaders see, think, decide, and act, but only when leaders actually use the PACER process.
An Opportunity for Founding Partners
At this stage of PACER's growth, we're looking for a small number of organizations willing to help us demonstrate what PACER can accomplish at enterprise scale.
For the right partner, an organization whose experience and results could become part of PACER's evidence base for years to come, PACER may offer a 90-day pilot at a substantial discount from standard membership terms.
In return, we'd ask to document the engagement and its results as a case study. Nothing would be published without your organization's express permission, and any public use of your organization's name would require your approval.
The cohort remains the same size. Rich and Jared remain personally involved. The First Outcome Guarantee still applies.
The reduction is in the price, not in the work.
If you believe your organization could be that kind of partner, mention it when we talk.
THE LEADERSHIP ARCHITECT
Rich Tyson
Co-Founder, PACER Leadership | Founder, CEObuilder | Creator of the PACER Models | Author of Align and Execute: It's All About the Money... But It's Not!
Rich Tyson is known as The Leadership Architect, a description that reflects 36 years of helping CEOs, founders, and senior executives build the thinking structures they need to work through their hardest leadership challenges. The name now also identifies the AI-enhanced coaching experience at the center of PACER membership. It brings Rich's models, principles, and disciplined questioning processes to leaders in the moments they need them.
Rich created the PACER models through decades of coaching leaders across more than 60 industries, including technology, manufacturing, healthcare, private equity, retail, and family enterprises. The models grew from real leadership challenges: strategy and execution, growth and profitability, acquisitions and exits, people and performance, difficult decisions, and the recurring tensions leaders face when there is no simple answer.
Underlying them all is Rich's conviction that leadership should ultimately be judged by its efficacy: the leader's ability to accomplish significant purposes through wise influence while helping others grow. His coaching has therefore focused not simply on solving the problem in front of the leader, but on developing the leader who will face the next one. That commitment to sustained growth is reflected in an average client relationship of 11 years.
Rich holds an MBA from Harvard Business School, where the insight behind what would eventually become the first PACER model began taking shape in 1977. He is the author of Align and Execute: It's All About the Money... But It's Not! and writes a monthly leadership column for the Utah Business Journal.
His coaching philosophy has remained remarkably consistent:
“I'm not here to answer your questions. I'm here to question your answers.”
36 Years | 60+ Industries | 100+ CEOs Coached | 11 Year Average Client Tenure
THE BUILDER
Jared Oates
Co-Founder, PACER Leadership | Co-Founder, Niche Academy | Author of Tension: Mastering the Superpower of Paradox-Aware Leadership
Jared Oates spent more than a decade co-founding and building Niche Academy, a learning platform that served thousands of organizations around the world. Long before he met Rich, however, he had begun studying leadership from a more personal angle, not by observing where other leaders struggled but by confronting his own mistakes.
In the first business he ran full time, Jared hired someone to take on the parts of the company he did not enjoy, gave him a broad outline, and told him to run with it. He was determined not to become like other micromanaging leaders he had seen in other settings. A month later the new employee told him plainly that he did not have what he needed to succeed. Jared had confused delegation with abdication. So they worked together to supply the missing structure. They narrowed the scope of the employee's role around training, provided him with a good software tool, and added some clear guidelines for implementation. Not long after that, the same employee came home from a customer implementation assignment and proudly claimed the one comfortable chair in the office, a chair reserved for people who had accomplished something. That experience led Jared to recognize a recurring leadership pattern: a genuine strength or virtue like autonomy, pursued without its necessary counterbalance (structure, in this case), can become a weakness.
Accountability without empathy. Confidence without humility. Vision without execution.
That insight became Tension: Mastering the Superpower of Paradox-Aware Leadership. After selling his stake in Niche Academy, Jared began looking for a problem worthy of the next decade of his life.
He found it in PACER Leadership.
Jared brought to PACER both a philosophy of paradox-aware leadership and more than a decade of experience building technology that could deliver learning at scale. Rich brought the Leadership Architecture, PACER models, and disciplined questioning processes developed through decades of work with CEOs and senior leaders. Together, they began building something neither could have created alone: a leadership development system that combines proven models, always-available AI coaching, human coaching, and peer learning. It meets leaders in the moments real leadership is actually happening.
Jared describes part of his mission in deeply personal terms: to capture for future generations the art, science, and magic of what Rich Tyson has spent 36 years building. But his role extends beyond preserving that body of work. He is building the systems through which PACER can continue learning, evolving, and reaching leaders at a scale neither founder could achieve alone.
Rich spent decades developing the architecture for helping leaders think and lead more efficaciously. Jared spent more than a decade building technology that brought learning and development to thousands of organizations. PACER exists because those two trajectories finally intersected.
THE PRODUCT
Three integrated layers of support. One purpose: leadership efficacy.
The Leadership Architect, Human Coaching, and Live Mastermind Sessions are not independent products. Each contributes something different to the same purpose: helping leaders accomplish significant purposes through wise influence while helping others grow.
The Leadership Architect
Always-available AI coaching built around the PACER models and designed to challenge your thinking, not simply validate it. Bring it a hard decision, a difficult conversation, an execution problem, or an assumption you're no longer sure you should trust. It helps you question your answers, examine alternatives, and think with greater discipline, in the moment you actually need it.
Available 24/7. No scheduling. No waiting.
Human Coaching
Some leadership challenges require more than an always-available thinking process. They benefit from relationship, judgment, context, empathy, accountability, and the discernment that develops between two people over time. PACER coaches help leaders go deeper by recognizing patterns, challenging assumptions, following commitments, and bringing a human perspective to the decisions that carry the most weight.
The Leadership Architect brings immediacy. Human coaching brings relationship and depth.
Live Mastermind Sessions
Quarterly virtual sessions bring leaders together with executive peers carrying comparable levels of responsibility. Here, leaders test their thinking against perspectives shaped by different industries, experiences, and points of view, and discover possibilities that may remain invisible when they think alone.
Peers don't simply share answers. They help one another question them.
WHAT WE BELIEVE
PACER Leadership is not built for scale at all costs.
It is built for leaders willing to think carefully, act responsibly, produce real results, and learn over time.
We believe leadership is formed, not downloaded. We believe tension is not a flaw. It is a signal. And we believe progress comes from disciplined inquiry, not heroic certainty.
We also believe leadership must ultimately produce results. Good intentions are not enough. Leaders are responsible for accomplishing the purposes their organizations exist to achieve: growth, profitability, execution, innovation, customer value, organizational capability, and the development of their people.
But how those results are achieved matters too.
Leadership Architecture strengthens the thinking behind leadership. Better thinking creates alignment. Alignment enables disciplined execution. And disciplined execution turns significant purposes into measurable results.
Leadership Efficacy holds the entire standard together: accomplishing significant purposes through wise influence while helping others grow. It asks not only, “Did we achieve the result?” but also, “What did our leadership produce in the people and the organization that achieved it?”
That means PACER rejects a false choice. Leaders should not have to choose between extraordinary results and the growth and humanity of their people. Efficacious leadership demands both: outcomes that matter, achieved through sound judgment, aligned people, and excellent execution, with people strengthened in the process.
Sustained over time, that is what creates significance: results that matter, organizations that are stronger, and people who are more capable because of the leadership they experienced.
That is what PACER exists to make possible.
If that resonates, you are exactly who we built this for.
FOR THE EXECUTIVE WHO OWNS LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT
If you are accountable for developing your organization's leaders, PACER was built for you.
You carry an unusual responsibility. You are expected to prepare leaders for challenges no curriculum can fully anticipate. You have to show that development is changing how they lead. And you have to justify an investment whose most important results may never appear neatly on an L&D dashboard.
Participation is measurable. Completion rates are measurable. Satisfaction is measurable.
But none of those answers the question your CEO ultimately cares about: Is leadership development changing what happens in the business?
PACER was built around that question.
Rather than asking leaders to complete content and hoping they apply it later, PACER begins with the real challenges and outcomes they already own. Leaders use the Leadership Architect in the moments those challenges are actually unfolding, supported by human coaching and the perspective of executive peers.
And we don't ask you to make an enterprise-wide bet to find out whether it works.
Start with five or six leaders. Define the outcomes that matter before the pilot begins. Give us 90 days. Then evaluate PACER against evidence you and your executive team actually trust.
During this stage of PACER's growth, Rich and Jared will be personally involved. And the First Outcome Guarantee means we're willing to share the risk of proving PACER makes a difference.
Don't ask whether your leaders liked PACER. Ask whether their leadership changed what happened next.
If the answer is yes, we'll have earned the right to a larger conversation.
Built for you if
You are responsible for developing leaders whose decisions have real consequences for the business.
You have seen the gap between what leaders know and what they actually do when the pressure is on.
You believe leadership development should be connected to consequential business outcomes, not simply participation, completion, or satisfaction.
You want to give leaders support in the moments they are actually leading, not only in scheduled programs, workshops, or coaching sessions.
You believe the best development challenges leaders to examine their assumptions, question their answers, and think more rigorously, not simply confirm what they already believe.
You need a more credible answer when your CEO asks, “What are we getting for our investment in leadership development?”
And you are willing to test a different approach against outcomes that matter.
This is not built for
Organizations looking primarily for another library of leadership content.
Leaders who want faster answers instead of better thinking.
Programs that measure success primarily by participation, completion, or satisfaction rather than meaningful changes in leadership and results.
Organizations looking for a one-time leadership event rather than development that continues as real challenges unfold.
Organizations unwilling to define consequential outcomes at the beginning and evaluate whether meaningful progress occurred.
And it is not designed to begin with hundreds of leaders. PACER pilots are deliberately small because we believe evidence should precede scale. Start small. Define what matters. Prove what works. Then scale what earns the right to scale.
If you would rather have a conversation with the founders about whether your organization is a fit for a pilot, send us a note and we'll be in touch within two business days.
FOR ORGANIZATIONS
Your organization is unique. Your PACER pilot should reflect it.
Every pilot begins with your leaders, their real challenges, and the outcomes that matter to your organization. The PACER methodology remains disciplined. Its application is specific to you.
When you submit this form, we'll connect with you to understand your goals, then tell you honestly whether PACER is the right fit.
Let's Talk
READY TO SEE HOW IT WORKS?
Start with the methodology. Decide after you've experienced it.
Bring a real leadership challenge. See how PACER helps a leader see it more clearly, think about it more rigorously, and decide what happens next.
Our free recorded training, about 77 minutes, introduces the PACER methodology through the same models and disciplined questioning processes Rich Tyson has developed and used with executives over 36 years. No hypothetical leadership theory. No generic demonstration. Watch it anytime, no sign-up. See the methodology, then decide whether it belongs in front of your leaders.
Bring a real challenge. Question your answers. See what changes.
PACER Leadership · Built on 36 years of executive coaching methodology · pacerleadership.com
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