Dan Geelhoed and the fortune hiding in the paperwork

A payment has gone through. The invoice has been filed. Everyone involved has good reason to consider the matter closed. Dan Geelhoed built a business around the possibility that it deserves another look. Somewhere between a supplier’s records and a customer’s accounts, a credit may be sitting unused, a payment may have been duplicated, or the agreed price may have quietly parted company with the price actually paid. Paperwork has a talent for looking settled.

For more than three decades, Geelhoed’s working territory has been that gap between apparent order and financial reality. SpendMend, the Grand Rapids company he founded, grew from recovery auditing into a broader collection of services and software for understanding costs. Its expansion involved specialist teams, acquisitions and outside capital. The underlying question remained wonderfully awkward: what has the organization failed to see?

In June 2026, he made a different kind of adjustment. Trey Cook became chief executive, and Geelhoed moved to the board. The founder who had spent years widening the company’s view would now help guide it from another seat.

A career in the overlooked

Geelhoed’s professional roots run through Business Strategy, Inc., the business associated with SpendMend’s early history. He served as its president, later held a commercial leadership role at PRGX Global, and became the public face of SpendMend’s expansion. His education at Aquinas College combined accounting and marketing. The pairing gives his career a fitting introduction: understand the numbers, then persuade someone that the numbers deserve attention.

Recovery auditing provides a concrete starting point. An organization has paid its suppliers. An auditor examines the transactions for money that should come back. Duplicate payments and open credits offer two examples. Finding them requires enough knowledge of the records to distinguish an actual recovery from a tempting misunderstanding.

That work also poses a larger question. Recovering money addresses the immediate loss. Examining the circumstances behind it can expose a process that needs fixing. As SpendMend developed, Geelhoed increasingly described the opportunity in terms of visibility, useful insights and preventing future leakage. A recovered dollar is welcome company. A recurring error is a rather less charming guest.

In June 2018, SpendMend received Premier’s Supplier Horizon Award, one of eleven suppliers recognized that year. The award covered a supplier’s early years under contract with Premier, and its criteria included customer engagement and value. Geelhoed linked the recognition to his company’s change in direction: customers were responding to a service that paired recovery with better visibility and prevention. That connection between a finding and a practical improvement would recur throughout his explanation of the business.

The records outside the report

In a 2019 essay, Geelhoed gave a name to the information that ordinary reviews leave behind: dark data. He described financial information as “not easily visible, sometimes not accessible, and rarely timely.” His explanation was practical. Records lived in separate systems. Integration was inadequate. Reports failed to cross the gaps. Transactions happened long before the relevant information reached the person who needed it.

The problem, in his telling, was larger than an untidy spreadsheet. Time could make information harder to retrieve and less useful. Reviewing the familiar records again would leave the unfamiliar ones undisturbed. His proposed change concerned where financial professionals looked and which information they asked to see.

That argument helps make sense of SpendMend’s subsequent shape. The company could keep recovering money from past transactions while adding ways to understand contracts, rebates and purchasing decisions. Each additional capability offered another route into the financial picture. Geelhoed’s attention had moved from individual findings toward the conditions that made findings possible.

Buying a wider field of view

“Nearly five years ago we pivoted,” Geelhoed said in September 2022. He was describing a deliberate effort to broaden how customers understood SpendMend. Internal development and acquisitions had expanded its services beyond profit recovery. The business was asking for a larger place in the customer’s financial operations.

The acquisitions make that intention tangible. In August 2018, SpendMend announced an agreement to acquire Contract Management Strategies, founded by Clayton Hale. The combination brought additional audit and tax capabilities, professionals with their own experience, and services that could be offered across the two customer bases. Geelhoed emphasized the exchange: SpendMend’s technology and analytics could reach CMS clients, while CMS expertise could reach SpendMend’s.

VIE followed in 2022. Its founder, Lisa Miller, had built a consulting business focused on reducing non-labor expenses. The appeal for Geelhoed was detailed visibility into purchased services agreements. He wanted the line items, where a broad spending category becomes a collection of actual prices, terms and opportunities. Miller remained in charge of the acquired group, continuing to work from New Jersey.

In June 2023, SpendMend added Rebate Insight. Its software organized rebate data and supplied forecasting and analysis tools. Founders Tony Garcia and Jonas Langvad continued managing the division. The deal extended the same financial curiosity into another place where an organization might have earned value without fully collecting it.

By June 2025, that curiosity also covered equipment a customer no longer needed. SpendMend bought Mazree, whose software supported redeployment and resale of surplus assets. Geelhoed’s rationale linked its auction and redeployment technology to the company’s existing cost management work. The object under examination had changed from a payment record to a physical asset. The question of overlooked value was familiar.

Growth needs more people

Those additions required an organization capable of absorbing them. SpendMend partnered with Sheridan Capital Partners in January 2018. During that partnership, the company expanded its executive ranks, hiring finance, operations, sales and marketing leaders. Its technology team grew from two people to more than fifteen. The capacity to deliver more services had to be built alongside the ambition to sell them.

During the Sheridan partnership, SpendMend reported average annual organic growth above twenty percent and an employee count that increased by more than one hundred and fifty percent. The company was becoming larger in the everyday organizational sense: more people, more specialist responsibilities and more work passing between teams.

In 2022, investment funds managed by Morgan Stanley Capital Partners acquired a controlling interest. Geelhoed and longtime leadership colleague Rob Heminger continued leading the business, while Sheridan retained a minority stake. Later that year, Spectrum Health Ventures and Memorial Hermann also invested. The company’s financial backers increasingly reflected the market it served.

For 2022, SpendMend reported a fourth consecutive year of revenue growth above thirty percent. It also reported a twenty percent rise in employee count and a customer base exceeding 150 major U.S. systems.

The transactions also drew attention closer to home. In March 2023, SpendMend announced that its 2022 investment deals had received MiBiz’s healthcare deal award. Geelhoed used the occasion to credit Grand Rapids law firm Miller Johnson for advice on the company’s acquisitions. It was a reminder that the expanding business still depended on a network of professional relationships in its home city.

“Our vision was to change the recovery audit industry”

Dan Geelhoed · 2018

After the meeting, a bus to the park

There is a useful smaller scene in the middle of this expansion. At the 2024 annual gathering in Grand Rapids, Geelhoed and Heminger led the all-hands meeting. Service leaders discussed their departments and plans for the coming year. The agenda concerned transformation: a growing business, a broader range of services and the work ahead.

Then the employees boarded buses for Millennium Park. The outing had a family focus, with time to relax and spend time together. Al Brander, a senior leader who attended, remembered both the company’s ambitions and the effort its leadership made to connect with colleagues. In his account, the trip belonged to the same day as the business updates.

Some relationships had begun on the other side of a competition. Teri Harkins, who joined in July 2011, recalled knowing Geelhoed when Business Strategy was a rival for projects. Her route into the company supplies another modest piece of its history: people who once competed for the work could eventually become the people helping to carry it out.

The detail gives the company a human scale. An acquisition announcement tells us what was bought. A gathering shows some of the people expected to make the combination work. Financial visibility depends on software and specialist knowledge; building the organization also involves getting colleagues into a room, then occasionally getting them out of it.

A different seat at the table

The June 2026 succession brought in Cook, whose previous chief executive roles included STARLIMS and Quantros. Geelhoed endorsed his ability to connect strategy, operations and commercial execution. The appointment placed responsibility for the next stage with a leader accustomed to running technology businesses. Geelhoed’s continuing board role concerned long-term strategy and growth.

Cook’s early reflections returned to the idea at SpendMend’s foundation: clearer financial operations and more confidence in decisions. He also described customers who regarded its people as an extension of their teams. That offers a revealing measure of the business Geelhoed had helped assemble. Alongside the software and transactions sat relationships that another chief executive would have to maintain.

SpendMend now lists its founder as CEO Emeritus. The title acknowledges a long tenure while leaving the operating job with his successor. Geelhoed’s story has reached the point where continuity depends partly on other people carrying the work forward.

His original territory remains easy to recognize. A report arrives. A payment clears. An account appears settled. Somewhere, perhaps, a useful question has been filed away with the paperwork. Geelhoed made a career of opening the folder.