Part of The Next 10. Ten years of building what didn’t exist.
Ten minutes into the first training session he ever led, Brody Larson learned the most important lesson of his consulting career.
The room was a shipyard conference room, filled with trades supervisors, the people who run the welders, the painters, the boilermakers. Jon had handed him the session that morning. So there he was at the front of the room, laptop plugged into the projector, walking through the basics. Open the browser. Go to this URL. Here’s how you log in.
Then he said it. “If you right-click here, you can open this in a new tab.”
A hand went up in the back. The first question of the day.
“Hey, what do you mean, right-click?”
Brody walked over and pointed at the mouse. “There are, in fact, two buttons. The left one clicks things. The right one gives you some options.”
The supervisor got it immediately. New level unlocked. And Brody got something too. These are people who spend their days on the ship doing what he calls “real work,” or working with their hands, not at a keyboard. If the software was going to matter to them, it had to meet them exactly where they were.
Then and there he learned to slow down, assume nothing and build for the people actually doing the work.
Three desks and a short-term plan
When Brody walked into Oxalis for the first time, the whole company fit in a three-desk office. (A three-desk office with a great view, he’ll have you know.) There were one, maybe two customers at that point. Nobody was a full-time employee yet. Everyone, founder included, was a contractor.
Brody was an intern who, by his own admission, didn’t fully know what technology consulting was. That first summer he did everything. Website redesign, branding work, cold-calling prospects, and tagging along to a longtime shipyard client in the Pacific Northwest, ten minutes from where he lived, to take notes and do whatever Jon told him to.
The plan was simple. Intern under Jon for a few months, maybe a year, learn how business gets done, and then go apply at one of the big consulting firms.
“I never did,” he says. “So, here I am.”
Why a year became eight
Today Brody is a principal consultant with five consultants reporting to him. He leads most of the firm’s first engagements with new customers, the small, prove-yourself projects that decide whether a new client becomes a long-term one. He calls that role being Oxalis’s foot in the door, and he means it as a point of pride.
When candidates he’s interviewing flip the question around and ask why he’s still there, he gives them the same answer every time. At Oxalis, you build the business while doing the work. In a single day he might be running client projects, mentoring his team, interviewing new hires, and improving the internal systems that make the next stage of growth possible.
“I have grown as the company has grown,” he says. Some days that’s chaotic. Most days it’s the reason he stayed.
The moments that proved it
Ask Brody for the win that stuck with him, and he doesn’t reach for a revenue number. He tells you about a leader at that longtime shipyard client who changed companies and brought Oxalis with her. New role, new industry, reputation on the line, and her first move was to call the firm she trusted.
“We proved ourselves in her mind,” Brody says. “She was going to bring us along with her.”
Then there was the day a second shipyard went live on OSRS, the system Oxalis originally built because nothing on the market could do what that client needed. Watching another yard adopt it, integrated with the Navy’s own database, was the moment a one-client solution became a product. That product line has since been rebuilt smarter twice over, and today it’s called YARDOS.
And behind those wins, what Brody thinks people outside the firm don’t get to see, is leadership that never left the work. “Many times I have seen Jon hear or sense that a project wasn’t on track,” he says, “and just step in to help fix it. Not all leaders are willing or able to do that. He’s both.”
The next ten
Oxalis hit 50 employees this year, a threshold that still surprises the guy who joined a three-desk office. He works daily with teammates in Guadalajara that he calls some of the best he’s had. The firm’s partnerships keep opening new doors, and YARDOS is taking Oxalis back to the shipyard customers he’s missed since his early years.
His focus for the decade ahead sounds exactly like him. Build the systems that help the next 50 people ramp up faster than he did, so a company that learned by doing can keep doing it at scale.
Ten years in, Oxalis is still hiring the way it hired Brody, and looking for people who want to build the company while doing the work.
Join our next ten. → Careers at Oxalis
