Our Team
DAVE RIDER
Founder
Dave Rider has over 30 years of hands-on leadership experience. He is passionate about personal development, and coming alongside leaders, helping them integrate high performance and organizational health. He is an adaptive problem-solver with a perceptive analytical capacity. Dave is known for his ability to dissect large cultural and relational-based issues.
For the past 10 years, Dave has run a leadership consulting practice outside Chicago, Illinois. He brings a deliberate focus to the intersection of individual leadership and organizational challenges. Dave partners with leaders to better understand the unseen operating system of their lives. Dave works the deeper waters of interpersonal and cultural challenges, with a fresh perspective on leadership health that addresses the internal and performance capacities of your leaders. He intentionally addresses the developmental issues of emotional intelligence, relational connection, and character-based health. He integrates his strong organizational skills with his understanding of leadership maturity, allowing him to provide insight and guidance from a unique vantage point.
Dave spent much of his earlier career in Fortune 500 companies. He began his career in manufacturing, and operational excellence. He has over 14 years of experience in human resources, with responsibilities that spanned leadership development, learning/knowledge management, and HR Leadership.
CREIG
DAY
Creig’s passion is helping leaders better see and understand themselves and the world around them. To help leaders gain a fresh perspective on the often-unrealized talent, capacity and beauty that exists within them and the teams God has entrusted them to lead. He has a strategic mind and a relational heart that, coupled with gifts of wisdom and encouragement, helps leaders understand themselves and ‘unlock’, ‘untangle’, and ‘unleash’ what God is doing in them. Creig brings more than 35 years of marketplace, ministry, and community leadership experience to each conversation. He helps leaders gain fresh lenses to challenge old paradigms, and to find new courage, energy, and approaches to the challenges and opportunities that lie before them. Creig is very comfortable with and enjoys working with people within all levels of an organization. Over his lifetime, Creig has led in churches and businesses of vastly varying sizes. And at the community level, has worked to inspire, mobilize, and lead teams that have enabled thousands of people to use their God-given talents and resources for the betterment of their city.
KAREN
FRANZEN
For nearly three decades, Karen L. Franzen has facilitated groups and individuals from relational breakdown to relational breakthrough. She is an experienced therapist, church and not-for-profit ministry leader, and spiritual director. Karen’s passion for and proven track record with building healthy teams consistently results in personal vibrancy and organizational sustainability. She humbly challenges leaders at every level, career stage, and corporate sector through transformational teaching/training, team retreats, and coaching sessions. Karen and her husband Bill have a dynamic blended family, with five adult children and nine grandchildren. As an active member of her church, Karen serves as a leader of leaders through missions, groups, and retreats both locally and internationally.
NATE
ROSS
Nate is passionate about connecting leaders to their Creator, helping them to break through their growth barriers and thrive in their unique calling. Having grown up in a pastor’s home that served Churches ranging from the midwest to Las Vegas, he’s had an opportunity to see and be poured into by incredible leaders. Nate has served as a guidance counselor for a University that saw their largest enrollment year in school history, served on boards of global non-profits, served in the local Church in every role imaginable and most recently served as lead pastor for over five years of a Church over 6,000 that was twice named one of the top 100 fastest growing Churches in America (2018, 2019). Nate loves to help leaders turn their moments into movements.
NEIL
TROYER
Neil is passionate about helping leaders and churches thrive, focusing on growth and development with an emphasis on spiritual health, personal health, relational dynamics and mission focused vision and strategies. He has 19 years of pastoral and leadership experience. He has a proven track record of building and developing healthy culture, equipping leaders to thrive, and developing teams and strategies that help churches move their mission forward.
He is a people first, goal oriented, results driven leader with the gift set to dream about the future, championing vision and developing actionable strategies that make that vision a reality. He has the ability to read the room, intuitively understanding unique personal and relational dynamics that impact conversations and culture at large. He uses this to help navigate difficult or complex conversations to work toward a greater goal or outcome.
Neil is a coach with Rider Leadership while also serving as the Executive Pastor at LifeBridge Christian Church in Longmont, CO. Neil has been on staff at single site and multisite churches ranging from 1,200 to 9,500 in live weekly attendance. He has served on and led multiple teams including Directional, Executive, and Leadership teams. He has also led a team to create and execute multiple large special events with over 2,000 in attendance.
JULES
WILHELM
Jules Wilhelm is the creator, founder, and president of Capacity Leader Center, Cardia Counseling Center, and EQ-niversity™ where she has been providing effective counseling and coaching for more than 20 years.
Through the thousands of face-to-face hours of coaching and counseling with high capacity leaders in both the public and private sector, she has first-hand knowledge of the type of impact created when leaders are equipped with emotional intelligence skills and strengthened in their personal character competencies. Benefits range from employee productivity, work environment positivity, increased retention, and more satisfying personal lives.
Jules created and directed the Leadership and Impact Training: A Training Series for Senior Living, to meet the specific needs of senior housing. She formerly directed a chapter of the Townsend Leadership Program. She served as instructor & educator at the Townsend Institute and adjunct instructor in graduate programs at Wheaton College, Indiana Wesleyan University, and Huntington University. She has been the featured speaker at conferences for academic and professional audiences both nationally and internationally.
Presently, Jules focuses her energy and credible knowledge on transforming the leadership of the world’s top executives in Senior Living, publishing & facilitating EQ virtual courses in her founded school called EQ-niversity™, and creating real lasting change in the leadership of those leaders that fundamentally know a more compassionate and empathetic way to lead people through her Next Level Leadership™ trainings.