Montgomery County Youth Services
After graduating from the University of Texas at Austin I moved to Miami, FL to pursue a PhD in Clinical Psychology from Nova Southeastern. I quickly realized that psychiatric hospitals were taking over the industry and I was not aligned with the ethics of their practices. I wanted to counsel at-risk youth and their families. Fortunately, before I had spent any money on actual classes I returned to The Woodlands, TX and became a social worker at a local United Way agency. I was a counselor for runaways, truants, and youth that were designated as at-risk of doing either from 1988 – 1998 at Montgomery County Youth Services. The grant that I worked under paid a consistent $18,500.00 per year every year. When MCYS built a challenge course I took advantage of the opportunity to learn a new skill. I had already been using non-physical activities to create awareness within families of their challenges with communication and collaboration. The challenge course was a giant version of such activities. Eventually, I became the Adventure Based Coordinator (responsible for camping trips, summer camp, and groups that visited the challenge course) and trained a lot of people how to facilitate collaboration-building activities and personal growth challenges (such as jumping off of a 30-foot tall pole toward a trapeze bar with only a rope tied to the back of your harness).
While at MCYS I was recognized for my ability to get fathers to constructively participate in counseling. Therefore, I was invited by the United Way to facilitate a particularly challenging (all male) fund allocation committee meeting that included members of companies that competed in the same industries. Once I was able to get everyone to set their professional differences aside, we made quick progress. Some of the members of that committee then hired me to come to their offices and facilitate challenging meetings that they were having. I started to leverage the non-physical collaboration and communication awareness activities at the start of each meeting, which resulted in faster results and referrals to new business.
To supplement my social work income I started my own company, Ulmer and Associates. Through this entity I published my original corporate training activities (and those that I used in group counseling) in five books, spoke at several national and international conferences each year, and formally studied ‘training’. I used a traditional instructional design model during the three years (02/92-02/95) that Ulmer and Associates existed. During this time I also became certified in several personality and personal preference assessments that I used during coaching sessions and when training company leaders (e.g. MBTI, FIRO-B, In-Q, I-Opt, Strong Interest Inventory, customized instruments built with ODTools software, org effectiveness assessments, climate surveys, and 360° assessments).
MCYS could not pay me more than the grant allowed, but I was incentivized to bring corporate clients to the agency’s challenge course. The companies would pay MCYS for the use of the course, which helped me double my income and raised much needed money at a time when the agency was required to find matching funds for several grants. These corporate groups attracted the attention of a start-up company called Performa Solutions. I joined Performa when they were only weeks old. I had a lot of vacation time and I worked a lot of weekends at MCYS so I had plenty of time to devote to helping Performa create marketing and sales materials, write proposals and contracts, and to design collaboration-building and leadership development programs for clients. I also trained all of their contract staff in my facilitation style and on the safe use of the challenge course. As the company grew (and I tired of working 7 days per week) I finally joined Performa full time and left MCYS. To be honest, I was also over-extending myself by authoring several articles for HR.com, PIOP.net, TERABULL, Houston ODNet, and The Facilitator newsletters. My work was featured in Meetings and Conventions Magazine (Dec. 1998) and McGraw-Hill's 2000 Training and Performance Sourcebook. I wrote three chapters for Lominger's T7 Team Architect resource manual and a highly regarded challenge course program facilitation and safety manual. I published five books during these years, three of which are still available: Facilitating Interpersonal Skills-Based Training Groups, Facilitating Corporate Solutions, and Play Play Play (games you never played before because I just made them up).
