Christopher J. Kuselias and the business of starting over.

Before Christopher J. Kuselias was helping people reconsider their careers, he was a shortstop, a quarterback and a point guard. At Hamden Hall, he collected all-league recognition across three sports and, in 1980, the school’s Mr. Hustle Award. It is an unusually convenient title for the beginning of a business biography. Most entrepreneurs have to wait considerably longer for someone to supply the branding.

The baseball player went to the University of Connecticut. The finance student became a business founder. The sports enthusiast found himself sharing a national radio show with his brother. Career Team, which he started with his wife, Susan, in 1996, became the long-running enterprise connecting those other chapters: a company working with people who needed a route into employment.

Today, his work includes Ocean Crest Ventures, founder mentoring and Making Waves, his entrepreneurship book and community. The job seeker and the company founder occupy different positions in the economy. Kuselias has made both his concern. Read his career as a sequence of job titles and it looks restless. Read it as a sustained interest in what people might do next, and the turns begin to make sense.

The shortstop with an English minor

His first route out of school came with a partial baseball scholarship to UConn. He was Hamden Hall’s first Division I baseball scholarship recipient. At university, he majored in finance and minored in English, a pairing that gave the future businessman something more interesting to study than a balance sheet alone.

He earned first-team All-Big East recognition as a senior, was selected for All New England All-Star events at Fenway Park and Shea Stadium, and became an alternate for the 1984 Pre-Olympic Baseball Team. UConn’s records list him among its baseball letterwinners for 1982, 1983 and 1984. Those are concrete milestones in a life that would eventually involve a great deal of talking about potential.

When Hamden Hall named its inaugural Athletic Hall of Fame honorees in 2013, Kuselias was among them. He returned to a school where he had also become a parent. That return gives the athletic chapter a satisfying second scene: a former pupil being recognized by a community in which his own family now participated. The early ambition had acquired a longer memory.

A company for the gap between applications and paychecks

Christopher and Susan founded Career Team in 1996. Its work sits in the practical territory between wanting employment and being equipped to obtain it. The company serves workforce development boards, publicly funded work programs and educational institutions. A career can sound like a private adventure until it depends on a training provider, a case manager, an employer and a government program all communicating properly.

The business developed two complementary sides. Career Team provided workforce services. Career Edge supplied learning and case management software. The combination allowed a company grounded in direct support to offer tools that other organizations could use. It also put an unromantic business problem at the center of an ambitious social one: keeping the work organized.

Career preparation includes tasks that rarely make a stirring speech. Someone needs to understand a skill, finish a course, prepare for an interview or follow through on an appointment. The technology gives those tasks a place to live. The services give people help doing them. That arrangement explains more about the company Kuselias helped build than a motivational slogan could on its own.

By 2018, his Great American Career Calling campaign carried an ambition to help one million Americans find gainful employment. It was a stated goal, a measure of the scale he wanted to reach. The interesting detail is the verb: finding work was the action around which he organized the campaign. A large aspiration still had to come down to individual people making a move.

Two brothers, one microphone

Along the way, another part of his working life became audible. Kuselias and his brother Erik co-hosted SportsBrothers on ESPN Radio. An account of their broadcasting beginnings describes a local show, a one-week ESPN trial in 2002 and a weekday national program in 2003. The raw material was something the brothers already possessed: a lifetime of arguing about sports.

There is something pleasantly economical about turning a sibling disagreement into programming. Most families provide the content without discovering a distribution strategy. For the Kuselias brothers, it became a professional undertaking. Chris eventually turned his attention back toward his business, while Erik continued his broadcasting career. The shared surname can obscure two distinct working lives; the radio partnership was their point of overlap.

The broadcasting chapter also makes his later teaching work less surprising. He had practiced addressing people outside a boardroom. His career materials include short workshops about skills, goals, personal branding and asking questions. The subjects are practical, and the format depends on making an idea understandable quickly. A microphone and a career workshop each impose a useful discipline: give the listener a reason to keep listening.

The family business meets outside capital

By late 2021, Career Team and Career Edge had reached a different kind of decision. Christopher and Susan were considering an ownership transition that could provide liquidity while bringing in a partner for further expansion. It was a decision about capital, but also about the future of a company they had built together over decades.

The recapitalization closed on December 17, 2021. Iron Creek Partners led an investment group that included Main Street Capital Corporation and Career Team’s management. The announcement described growth capital going onto the companies’ balance sheets. Management would continue operating the business and retain a significant equity stake. Kuselias would remain CEO at the time of the transaction and join the reorganized board.

That sequence matters. A financing announcement captures a particular stage of a founder’s relationship with a company. It need not be the final scene. Kuselias is now identified as Career Team’s former CEO, with his attention extending to other ventures. The transaction gave the business a new ownership arrangement before his own public role took its later shape.

For a founder who now advises other founders, this is a useful part of the biography. Starting an enterprise and changing its ownership are different assignments. One requires persuading people that a business should exist. The other requires deciding how an existing business should continue. His experience includes both, with Susan beside him as co-founder.

From career preparation to company creation

In March 2024, Kuselias appeared on Boldline with Pam Nabors, president and CEO of CareerSource Central Florida. Their discussion followed his route through finance, broadcasting and workforce development into impact investing. Ocean Crest Ventures was the new undertaking under discussion, focused on startups intended to improve people’s lives. The conversation placed his newer work within the same broad concern for opportunity.

Ocean Crest now identifies him as its founder and chairman. Its team includes Alana Kuselias as head of marketing, responsible for campaigns, social strategy and work on Making Waves. The family connection continues into a new organization, although the assignment has changed. Instead of running only the business he helped establish in 1996, he is working around businesses taking shape elsewhere.

“The new currency is mindset.”

Chris Kuselias

Making Waves puts that phrase into an entrepreneurship curriculum. The book’s official page lists September 2026 availability and twelve modules covering subjects including personal brand, networks, choosing a problem, defining a value proposition and leadership. Its ocean metaphor supplies the vocabulary: momentum rises, conditions change, and the person trying to build something has to keep adjusting.

The accompanying community gives the idea a social setting. Making Waves Collective describes an open community and a twelve-week founders cohort with twelve participants. There is a deliberate intimacy in that advertised format. A small group can hear the actual problem behind a polished introduction. For someone considering a business, being asked to explain the next step may be more useful than being invited to admire somebody else’s finished career.

An invention starts earlier than a company

Kuselias’s interest in enterprise also reaches students. He serves on the board of NextMinds, the organization behind the Connecticut Invention Convention. His 2026 Push for Entrepreneurship fundraising page sets a $500 goal for an event scheduled for November 7 at Fairfield University. The stated purpose is to help students participate in invention programs.

The work gives his story a smaller, earlier starting point than the investment meeting. A student identifies a problem, makes something and explains the attempt. A company might eventually follow; the invention deserves attention before that becomes the question. Supporting that opportunity fits a career spent moving between preparation, work and enterprise.

There are ordinary pleasures around the professional itinerary. Kuselias is a Celtics supporter and fantasy football enthusiast. His dog, Dash, accompanies daily walks that he describes as useful thinking time. Christopher and Susan divide their time between Guilford, Connecticut, and Naples, Florida. The sports, family and shoreline have survived the changing job titles.

That may be the most appealing thing about the second act. The former shortstop has acquired new ways to spend his working day without having to edit the earlier chapters out of the story. He has helped build a company around getting ready for work. He now spends part of his time with people getting ready to build one. The next beginning has become part of the job.