Ben Spray and the expensive education of a company builder

Ben Spray’s first lesson in product development came with a bill. At 18, a few weeks into college, he had stopped attending class and decided to build a fintech app. He says he put in $30,000 saved from mowing lawns and grocery jobs, then borrowed another $50,000 at 22 percent interest. Within three months, the money was gone. The app had no users.

There was, however, one person who wanted it very badly: Spray. The distinction between wanting to build a product and finding someone who wants to use it can be difficult to appreciate until the bank account supplies an explanation. His did. He remembers feeling unusually alive, finally dealing with a business problem instead of reading about one.

That story supplies a useful introduction to the co-founder and CEO of Click Theory Capital. His career now spans starting companies, acquiring them and improving the work inside them. The early app is an unflattering beginning to keep in circulation. It also explains why, in his later thinking, the person who understands a job matters so much.

The title arrived after the work

By the opening of 2025, Dan Spray was publicly announcing Ben as CEO. Dan described a role Ben had naturally taken on during the previous three years. The announcement formalized it. Dan would remain president and founder, with the two continuing to share chief operating responsibilities.

There is something revealing about that sequence. A promotion can be an invitation to begin behaving differently. Here, the explanation was that the behavior had already changed: Ben was helping direct strategy and operations, and the title needed to catch up. Dan’s account puts the emphasis on responsibilities already carried rather than authority newly awarded.

The working relationship also provides a recurring character in Ben’s story. Dan is the colleague who announces the leadership transition and, later, the co-founder whose software experiment gives Ben another reason to reconsider his assumptions. This is a company-building story with someone else in the room.

A walk away from the keyboard

In June 2025, Spray joined a New York Tech Week kickoff walk on the High Line. He was discussing an AI-powered IT department and the capabilities he thought people still brought to the business. He singled out “Design and emotional intelligence.” His interest in AI came with an appreciation for judgment that a piece of software could struggle to supply.

A service business makes that argument concrete. A request arrives from a person with expectations, a history and a reason for asking now. Making the task faster is useful. Understanding the task is a separate piece of work. Spray’s emphasis suggests that he sees room for both, even while building companies around new technical capabilities.

The photograph catches him outdoors, wearing glasses and carrying a backpack, with Manhattan behind him. It is an apt setting for a discussion of human connection: people meeting while their computers wait elsewhere.

Norfolk enters the picture

Consolidated Consulting’s 2025 growth milestone came from Norfolk, Nebraska. That August, Spray described a company that had expanded from two people to 28 employees, including eight AI engineers. He said their work helped customers respond to requests and expand capacity. His stated aim was to make existing employees more effective.

The company’s Inc. 5000 record gives this part of the story two dated markers. It ranked No. 298 in 2025 and returned at No. 536 in 2026. The later entry records 648 percent growth over three years. These are company milestones, rather than a measure of Spray’s personal wealth or the size of every business associated with him.

A ranking compresses years of work into an ordinal number. It cannot explain the decisions behind the result, but it gives the story a marker beyond a founder’s ambitions. For Spray, the question running alongside it is practical: how does a customer’s business actually become easier to run?

The work already waiting to be done

Consolidated Consulting’s public service lineup makes the approach easier to picture. PrecisionIT supplies IT support. VegoCS handles customer service. Bland Applied Solutions implements and manages Bland’s voice AI platform. Tech Harbor Digital provides marketing services. Each starts with a recognizable business function.

There is a different kind of product question here from the one Spray faced at 18. The job already exists. Someone needs technical support, customer service, marketing or help putting a voice system into operation. The business has to decide how to perform that job, what technology improves it and what the customer will consider a good result.

The automation offering describes fees connected to money a project makes or saves. It also offers an initial month of engineering effort to demonstrate the work. The commercial proposition therefore asks technology to justify itself through an outcome. A feature list has to survive contact with a customer’s process.

Click Theory Capital extends the operating approach to acquisitions and new ventures. Its stated criteria include owner-operated B2B services, SaaS and technology-enabled professional services businesses with $1 million to $10 million in EBITDA. That figure describes the companies it seeks, rather than Click Theory’s own earnings. The distinction matters when a portfolio spans several businesses.

One acquisition has a named founder on the other side. Joshua Collin announced the sale of Bland Labs to Click Theory Capital, describing a team that built agents for customer interactions over voice and SMS. Spray welcomed that team into Bland Applied Solutions and Click Theory. The software arrives with people who have experience making it useful.

A weekend with a very long prehistory

Spray’s most pointed software anecdote concerns an internal tool. He says roughly $300,000 and six months in the first half of 2025 produced something that saved only a couple of minutes a day. Later, Dan rebuilt almost all of it over a weekend, using newer tools.

Ben’s explanation gives weight to two things: the technology had improved, and Dan understood the workflow. The weekend did not erase the earlier expense. It changed the circumstances in which the problem could be solved. A person close to the work had access to capabilities the original team had lacked.

“So pace your features.”

Ben Spray, reflecting on the internal tool

His advice is to reconsider timing when something is too technically difficult. That leaves an awkward question for a builder: is persistence useful today, or will better tools make the effort sensible later? His account favors attention to the task and to the moment, rather than treating every hard engineering problem as an immediate obligation.

For someone whose first app consumed savings before attracting demand, it is a recognizable change in emphasis. The work comes first. Software earns its place by helping.

The application he stopped sending

Spray also describes repeatedly applying to Y Combinator and taking rejection badly. Eventually, he skipped a batch. He had come to see the applications as a request for permission to pursue ambitions he already held. His explanation favors his team’s judgment over waiting for an outside institution to endorse it.

That admission gives the confidence in his public writing some context. Wanting approval can coexist with a strong belief in a business. An accelerator decision offers a simple answer to a complicated personal question. Continuing without it means the answer has to come from elsewhere.

His accounts leave room for errors after growth, too. He attributes a $1.2 million monthly recurring revenue loss during a difficult stretch from December 2025 to April 2026 to his own leadership decisions. He says delegation had become distance from standards and ownership. The lesson he draws is about retaining responsibility while handing over execution.

The cost is his estimate. The willingness to put himself in the explanation is the more revealing detail.

Something worth working for

On August 21, 2026, Spray delivered the keynote at Northeast Community College’s fall luncheon for Scott Pathway Scholars. He encouraged students to know their values and defend them. He described difficult career moments when he was working toward something that had stopped mattering to him, and emphasized character as a reason someone becomes worth backing.

It is a quieter destination than a growth announcement. The early app raises a question about demand. The software rebuild raises one about timing. The keynote adds one about purpose: whether the work still deserves the effort being given to it.

Spray’s story makes those questions sit together. A company can need customers, better tools and a leader willing to own the result. Its builder can also need a reason to keep choosing the work. The invoices are memorable. The decisions that follow them are where the story continues.