It gives me great pleasure to write this 'testimonial' for Larry Liss. I have known Larry for over a decade, and he has been an extremely positive force for me, both personally and professionally. I first met Larry in 2009 when I was part of a small team managing a highly successful hedge fund. Larry was brought in to coach the team to scale even greater heights.

Larry's coaching helped us achieve our 'best year ever', which was the motto that he had instilled in us. His coaching helped us sharpen our focus, collaborate effectively as a team, strengthen our weaknesses and raise our ambitions. His coaching taught us to 'think about our thinking', play together like a jazz band, try to 'know what we didn't know' and help each other become better.
He inspired us by drawing upon his military background and years of service to the nation even after leaving the military. His teachings stayed with us and helped us continue to deliver top decile performance for our clients for many years. Larry's wisdom and insights come from his decades of experience in leading and managing teams and organizations.

Ever since meeting Larry, I have tremendously benefited from his counsel and practical advice that has helped me considerably in overcoming obstacles and achieve success. I highly recommend him in a leadership and executive coaching role.

I write this to share some of my first hand experiences. Larry’s leadership coaching benefited me a great deal over the last 20 years.

I retired in January 2020 as a R&D director for Ethicon, one of the Johnson & Johnson medical device companies. I was with the company for over forty years, have many Patents on Surgical Devices and developed surgical devices that generate billions of dollars in revenues.

All of us know leadership is about knowing the market, shaping the strategies, focusing on deliverables, inspiring innovative high achievers to deliver business results and insure the funding are there to fuel the execution. Coaching from Larry helped me to crystalize how to set extraordinary goals & strategies, inspire others to deliver more than they thought possible and innovative ways to fund and resource the growth.

Many times, organizations want to play it safe and set safe goals that are incremental instead of extraordinary. These erosions do not grow strong leaders nor accelerate business results in our competitive markets. Setting ordinary goals encourage avoidance of risk but setting extraordinary goals provide a safe environment to discuss how to take on and mitigate risks for extraordinary results. Larry is always good at pushing the envelope. I often heard Larry said: “Why can’t we do that”, “How do we make that happen”, “What if these can be true”. Statements like these shifted our minds from coming up with excuses to finding ways to make these objectives happened. With Larry’s challenges, we delivered many extraordinary results and accelerated development of many leaders.

Not easy to manage high achievers but inspiring them will lead to extraordinary results. Larry’s coaching focus on listening to where others are thinking from. Reshaping where they are thinking from will inspire them to take different actions, which will deliver different results. We developed many great leaders by inspiring them to think differently and in turn, they delivered many extraordinary results.

With his many years in business and coaching of thousands of leaders, Larry also has a vast network of friends and followers at “high” places. After retirement, I got involved in a Department of Defense and law enforcement product. Within a week for agreeing with Larry on the approach, we met with the CEO of a defense product company and he is interested in partnering to develop & fund the project.

We are all about delivering great short and long term results. Leveraging Larry’s decades of experiences and learning helped me to inspired high achievers, delivered short term results and shaped longer term capabilities.

At a time in my life when I was experiencing extraordinary challenges, both professional and personal, the Universe presented the gift of Larry Liss to me. I am grateful and honored to write this testimonial more than 20 years hence, in the interest of sharing with you just one example of the many lives which Larry has impacted in profound and lasting ways.

I had the good fortune to have Larry matched with me as my executive coach during my tenure as the person tasked by Lucent Technologies to architect and lead what would become the largest outsourcing and manufacturing transformation in history. Having been brought in from the outside as the “voice of the possible”, the challenges which I encountered were the most complex set that I had ever experienced, in what I had at the time considered to be a fairly accomplished career. Conversations with

Larry helped me to find insight to solutions, courage to persevere, empathy for those with whom I was working, and ultimately significant and positive results… all from within myself.

Through that experience, Larry inspired and enabled me to recognize and commit to my purpose and my potential for positive impact, in my “one life” in which personal and professional are inseparable.

Since that initial engagement, and as my professional roles have become more senior, with adventures and challenges spanning industries, technologies, geographies, and circumstances (all transformational in one way or another), Larry has been a constant presence. Always a great listener and ever willing to share his experience, perspective, and insight, Larry is just as adept at somehow sensing when may be a great time to “check-in” and see how I am doing. These tend to be the most special and impactful interactions with Larry.

Sharing of himself while inspiring me to know and be true to my core, Larry has also been a significant influence in helping me to be the husband, father, brother, son, friend and community member that I strive to be…always a work-in-progress. His light is guiding, his care is nurturing, and his sharing is invaluable.

Older now than Larry was when I first met him, I consider Larry as both model and inspiration for me as I challenge myself to “pay it forward” and impact lives as Larry has mine.

In 2016 my brother introduced me to Larry after having a connection to him through JDog and Julip Run Capital. Little did I know just how impactful that meeting would be both personally and professionally over the next few years. After hearing about Larry’s experience in aviation and energy (I have an aviation background as well), I immediately hired Larry as a consultant to help guide me through the early stage “startup” thinking. He helped by sharing his experiences, participating in strategic negotiations, and coaching me through the various stages of business growth.

Over the next 2 years Larry helped our company secure a seed round of private equity funding, which provided our business the freedom to grow, and personally counseled me to help maintain a consistent vision for the company, reduce inefficient processes, and attract the right business and clients. His prior experience in the energy space, his unique business acumen, and his ability to motivate and instill confidence in me really helped me and my company grow in a time of need. Between 2016 and 2018 our company’s revenue grew 400% to over $1M in sales. As of 2022 our company has generated over $5.5M in sales.

In conclusion, I highly recommend Larry’s coaching and guidance for business owners and executives looking for strategic advice during critical points in their business and/or personal growth. Larry is absolutely in the top 1% of consultants who bring the wisdom and know how to help guide individuals but can also motivate a group of individuals to work collectively. I sincerely appreciate the professional and personal relationship I continue to have with Larry, and I look forward to hearing more stories of his success.

I had known Larry for about a year when he presented me with a business opportunity far different from my residential contracting business. It was 1978 and the world was in the middle of the Arab oil embargo with energy prices skyrocketing. Larry’s idea was to invest in a microprocessor-based building control system that we could sell to companies to help reduce their energy costs.

First of all, I had no idea what a microprocessor was, but I did know that saving businesses’ money was an idea I could understand, and we agreed to start a company called Diversified Energy Systems. It made total sense; selling a product that pays for itself. Larry reasoned that you can’t be in the energy management business if you didn’t have an insulation division. Again, made total sense. Larry contacted an old Army buddy, also a helicopter pilot, who had started an insulation company specializing in refineries and power plants and made him a partner in exchange for his company.

It was now 1982 and we were making real progress in the industrial marketplace when another opportunity presented itself. We were looking at an insulation project at Sun Oil and part of the scope of work was removing the existing insulation which happened to be asbestos. In short order it was clear that this was the future and before long we had 5 offices in Philadelphia, Malvern, Washington DC, Boston, and Oklahoma City. Being opportunistic would become the key to all of my future successes.

I was a college drop-out, but the business education I received from watching Larry put together all of the pieces of a growing business taught me more than any MBA program. Working with Larry changed the trajectory of my life.

Whatever success I have today, and I have been fortunate, can be traced back to that fateful evening when we shook hands and started on an amazing journey together. I will be forever grateful that Larry played such an important role in my life. I love him like a brother.

As recently as two weeks ago, I called on Larry to get his thoughts of a concern that I felt stuck with. Within 10 minutes of our meeting, he came up with a solution, totally off of my radar screen. Can not say how much additional revenue those 30 minutes turned into.