Less than two years ago, Michael Wagner was an Internet business strategist for Spindustry Systems Inc., traveling around the country to speak to clients about how to tailor their product and message to the Web.

Then, a physical exam revealed a torn heart valve that required open-heart surgery.

“When I got back, it was probably a natural transition time for me to think about what I needed to do next,” said Wagner, who has since built a home-based business, Wagner Speaks, that combines his public speaking skills with consulting. During his four years as a business strategist with Spindustry, Wagner often found that client companies had fundamental leadership and management issues that needed attention.

“I call it the ‘accidental X-ray,’” he said. “When I went in for Internet work, I had to ask all kinds of questions that touched on everything to do about the enterprise. If you do that, you find out, ‘Wow, there’s a leadership issue here.’ ‘They don’t know what teamwork looks like; collaboration isn’t part of what they do.’ Or, ‘Wow, these people don’t know what their marketing message is; that’s why they don’t know how to migrate their brand to the Internet.’”

About three months ago, Wagner joined with two other home-based consultants, Melynda DeCarlo and Tim McCoy, to form White Rabbit Group. The group of independent consultants specializes in providing organizational development and leadership guidance for businesses.

McCoy and Wagner, both of whom transitioned into the business world after leaving the ministry, had worked with each other on several consulting projects before joining DeCarlo.

“My time as a minister was primarily on the counseling side,” said McCoy, who got a taste of the corporate world when he joined a Fortune 500 company after leaving the ministry. “I found the same level of control and anxiety I found in the church were present in the corporate world,” he said. Now, he said, “I help organizations find their souls.”

Companies that have recently merged or been acquired, as well as those with succession issues or that are “stuck” in their product development or marketing processes account for much of White Rabbit’s business, Wagner said. The clients they have taken on individually have ranged from multinational corporations to small companies with 40 or 50 employees in Greater Des Moines.

“We chose [the name] White Rabbit because of Alice in Wonderland and the idea of going down the rabbit hole,” he said. Using a three-step approach, the consultants work to identify a company’s current “reality,” the direction it wants to take, and a strategy for how to get there.

“We sometimes see a significant disconnect between where leadership and management thinks things are and where the actual employees think things are,” Wagner said. “And those are real barriers to businesses moving forward.”

DeCarlo, who has worked 20 years in the training and development field, started her consulting business 10 years ago after her position as training director for Boatman’s Bank, now part of Bank of America, was eliminated. DeCarlo said she has always aligned with training partners as a consultant, and got to know McCoy through a joint project.

With White Rabbit, “philosophically, we’re very aligned with each other in what we believe,” she said.

White Rabbit’s goal is to “build an instructional design that allows companies to reinvent themselves, to create the performance they need to have in the marketplace and take them down the rabbit hole until they get to a place of clarity,” Wagner said.

he said. “And clarity feels pretty good after spinning your wheels all the time.”

Wagner, a motivational speaker who recently gave the keynote address for the Iowa Department of Economic Development’s annual SMART conference, said working from home as a consultant is challenging.

“You’re essentially fired from your job several times as year” as various consulting or speaking engagements come to an end, he said.

“I think the greatest fear,” McCoy said, “is (wondering), ‘Am I going to be adequate to this task?’”

“You have to be a risk-taker to be self-employed,” DeCarlo said. The best parts of working from home are the flexibility and variety, she said. “You get to work with a lot of different industries, and I think I’ve grown a lot more being self-employed than I would have otherwise. It really turns me on learning about different industries.”

As a consulting group, White Rabbit’s tactics are sometimes offbeat. They three principals have taken clients to movies such as “Master and Commander” as a launching point for guided discussons on leadership over drinks. They send out thank-you cards with the group’s unofficial motto, “Go to the places that scare you.”

Those places are where the growth is, and going there typically involves a long-term relationship with the client, over a three- to five-year period, McCoy said. “We’re more interested in a project as a process that’s really going to effect change in the organization,” he said.

“I really look at it as a change process rather than a class,” DeCarlo said. “We try to diagnose what the underlying issues are, what the systemic problem is.”

“Sometimes,” Wagner said, “just being able to talk about a subject openly is the absolute crucial beginning for changing the business environment and creating the necessary conditions for success. And we struggle with that, for lots of reasons. Because sometimes it’s unpleasant to talk about.

“We’re looking for a few courageous clients.”

For more information on White Rabbit Group, contact Michael Wagner at 371-7711 or e-mail to mike@wagnerspeaks.com.