I was twenty-two, halfway through my MBA at Campbell University, and running a $2.5 million food services budget with 96 full-time employees, fifty-plus part-time staff, and contracts with Chick-Fil-A, Quiznos, and a coffee shop. I had just rolled out the first campus-wide biometric POS system — fingerprint scanners at every register so students could pay without a card. I was exhausted, over my head, and convinced I'd eventually graduate and go do something smarter than run a dining hall.
Somewhere in the middle of that season, sitting in on a strategic planning session for the university, I had an insight that's defined every seat I've sat in since.
Campbell wasn't a food system.
It was an education system that happened to run food.
That sentence, written out twenty-five years later, sounds obvious. It was not obvious to the people running Campbell's food services in 2001. And it was not obvious to me until I sat in a room where the VPs and the president talked about students — about their graduation rate, their alumni network, their spiritual formation, their first job placements — and I realized that everything my team was doing either supported that mission or wasted it.
When a student skipped breakfast because the line was too long, that wasn't a food problem. It was an education problem. A student who's hungry at 10 a.m. doesn't learn well. When the hours on the coffee shop didn't match when students studied, that wasn't an efficiency problem. It was a student-support problem. When we spent months arguing about menu pricing, we were arguing about the wrong thing — the pricing only mattered as far as it affected whether students could afford to eat on campus instead of driving off campus and missing evening events.
Once I saw it that way, everything flipped.
The Reframe in Motion
Before the reframe: every operational decision I made got evaluated on food-system criteria. Cost per meal. Revenue per station. Inventory turns. Labor hours per cover.
After the reframe: every decision got a second question layered on top. Does this serve the educational mission? Does it support the student? Does it free the institution to do what it's actually about?
Cost per meal still mattered — budgets are budgets. But we started running the food operation in a way that deliberately supported Campbell's actual purpose. We restructured the hours around academic rhythms. We outsourced parts of the operation where a franchise could serve students better than we could. We integrated the POS with student ID so the whole campus moved toward one unified student experience. We helped the university understand that food services could be a recruitment advantage — not just a cost center to minimize.
That last piece is what led to what eventually became the strategic-planning panel engagement: the administration started asking me, a twenty-two-year-old food services manager, operational questions about the university as a whole. Not because I had answers about academics. Because I had shown them a way of seeing their own operation that they hadn't had.
The Question That Survived
Somewhere in the middle of that season, I started asking one question on everything I touched:
Is there a better way of doing it?
Not in a big-picture strategic way. In a mundane, tactical way. The checkout line is backed up again — is there a better way of doing it? Labor hours are overrunning on Wednesdays — is there a better way of doing it? Students complain that the coffee shop closes before their evening classes end — is there a better way of doing it?
The question was dumb in its simplicity. But it kept me from accepting inherited process as if it were permanent. It kept me from running the operation the way it had been run just because that's how it had been run. And more than anything, it kept me humble — because the answer was almost always yes, there is a better way, and I just hadn't thought about it yet.
I didn't know it at the time, but I was building a posture.
From Posture to Language
Years later, the question had a name. I started calling it ITABWODI — the acronym for Is There A Better Way Of Doing It?. I used it on whiteboards with my teams. I used it on business plans. I used it in board meetings. I used it with my kids at dinner when one of them was frustrated with homework.
ITABWODI isn't a slogan. It's a mental muscle that gets stronger with use. The people I've worked with who have developed the muscle — leaders on my teams, peers in other companies, people I've mentored — all share a common trait: they assume the current way is probably not the best way, and they're not offended when someone points to a gap.
The people who have NOT developed the muscle — some of them equally smart, sometimes with more experience — share a different trait: they treat existing process as evidence that the process is correct. "We've always done it this way" is a full sentence to them. It's a red flag for me.
The Meta-Reframe
Over the twenty-five years since Campbell 2001, I've watched the pattern repeat in every company I've touched.
K. Hovnanian Homes wasn't a homebuilder. It was a capital allocation company that happened to put up houses. The division that understood this allocated capital toward the product mix the market wanted; the division that missed it sat on inventory.
Faulkner/Haynes wasn't an HVAC manufacturers' rep. It was a relationship-management firm that happened to sell HVAC. The reps who understood this outsold the reps who tried to be technical experts.
Tower Engineering wasn't a $60M services firm. It was an M&A platform whose value depended on clean financials, defensible processes, and scale — none of which were present when I arrived. Seeing it as an M&A platform changed what was worth investing in and what wasn't.
Bobbitt Design Build wasn't a design-build firm. It was an operational excellence organization that happened to deliver design-build projects. Investing in operational excellence scaled the business from $35M toward $200M+.
CHE Companies isn't an exterior construction company. It's a platform that deploys the operational playbook across residential, commercial, and multifamily exterior work. Each division runs the playbook slightly differently, but they run the same one.
Every time I've walked into a business, the reframe has been there waiting. What does this organization think it's about? What is it actually about? Where does the gap between those two answers hide the opportunity?
The Principle
Here's the principle that makes the reframe work, the one I stumbled onto at Campbell in 2001 without knowing what I'd found:
Every organization has a surface identity and a true identity. The surface identity is the thing you name when someone asks what the business does. The true identity is what the organization actually delivers to the people it serves.
A food services operation delivers an educational environment.
A homebuilder delivers capital returns on land.
An HVAC rep delivers a relationship of trust with buyers.
A services firm delivers a scalable asset.
A design-build firm delivers operational excellence.
A construction platform delivers a repeatable playbook.
When the leader running the organization can't see the gap between surface and true — when they think the food services operation is really about food — they make decisions optimized for the wrong thing. The food-system leader maximizes cost per meal. The education-system leader maximizes the contribution of food services to the university's mission.
Same operation. Radically different results.
What to Do With This
If you're running any kind of organization — a company, a department, a nonprofit, a church, a household — the first ITABWODI question is the meta-question:
What does this organization think it's about? And what is it actually about?
The second question is the tactical one:
Is there a better way of doing it?
The first question reframes the whole operation. The second question makes the reframe operational.
I didn't invent this. I stumbled into it at twenty-two and then I practiced it for twenty-five years across eight seats in five companies. What I've learned is that the question is more durable than any framework, any methodology, any strategic plan. Frameworks go out of date. Methodologies get replaced. Strategic plans are rewritten every three to five years.
The question survives.
It survives because it's a posture, not a place you land. The moment you think you've arrived at the best way, you've lost the question. The moment you pick it back up, you're an operator again.
Closing
I owe Campbell University more than they'll ever know. They gave a twenty-two-year-old kid a budget and a team and a reason to learn how to see an organization for what it actually was. The lesson they taught me wasn't in any MBA class I took there.
I didn't know at the time that I was watching my grandfather's farmer instinct become a management philosophy. He'd been asking the same question his whole life, I just didn't recognize it until I started asking it myself.
Now, twenty-five years later, I run a $70M+ construction platform, build AI products with my own hands, and ask the question every day in every domain of my life. Not because I invented it.
Because Campbell in 2001 showed me I'd been looking at the whole thing wrong.
ITABWODI. Is There A Better Way Of Doing It?
It's always the first question. And it's never the last.