Founded on Real-World Experience
A practitioner-first approach to organizational transformation.
Benjamin Michaels
Founder/CEO, FutureBack Consultants
Benjamin founded FutureBack because he kept seeing the same pattern: organizations with clear vision but no coherent path to get there. He realized that real transformation requires something different. It starts with where you want to be, then works backward to identify what has to be true to reach it. When the entire organization—leadership, operations, frontline teams, finance—shapes that vision and roadmap together, everything changes. Clarity replaces guessing. People own the strategy instead of just executing orders. Work gets done because everyone understands the destination and knows what their role is.
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He's lived this from the inside. He's built companies from scratch and scaled them. He's run operations in messy, complicated environments where mission and margin have to coexist. He's rebuilt organizations when rapid growth threatened what made them valuable. He's navigated the politics and compliance that come with mission-driven work. And he's done it all with constrained resources, where every person and dollar has to count.
His MBA is in New Venture Development. His MPH is in Health Policy and Management. But the real education came from fifteen years of doing this work across healthcare, nonprofit, tech, and commercial sectors. That's what shapes how he works with clients now.
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He doesn't believe in cookie-cutter consulting. He pushes back on frameworks that claim to fit every situation. What he cares about is understanding your specific reality, designing something that actually works for you, and staying present through the hard implementation phase when the theoretical meets the practical.
He's seen plenty of strategies that looked perfect on paper and never made it out of the meeting room. He's also seen imperfect approaches that moved mountains. He optimizes for what works, not what looks elegant. That means recommending the path you can actually execute, even if it's not the tidiest one.
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Working across different sectors teaches you something valuable: the best ideas don't come from within your industry. A staffing model from tech solves a nonprofit's recruitment problem. A capital structure that worked in healthcare becomes a revenue strategy for a mission-driven venture. Once you've seen how different industries solve similar problems, you start seeing possibilities others miss.
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His reputation depends on whether your transformation actually sticks. Not on whether he delivered the plan he promised. That changes how he shows up. It means being honest about what's working and what isn't. It means adjusting course when reality doesn't match assumptions. It means staying committed to outcomes, not checking boxes.
Expertise
Organizational design and scaling · Strategic planning and business model innovation
· Operational optimization and process improvement · Leadership team development and coaching
· Change management and implementation · Health policy and systems thinking · Cross-sector strategic partnerships · Venture architecture and business model validation · Capital strategy and financial sustainability · Stakeholder alignment and governance · Team building and organizational culture
· Regulatory and policy navigation
