The first piece of infrastructure in Fusion Risk Management’s origin story was a restaurant tablecloth. David Nolan and John Jackson used it to sketch a business plan over an Italian meal. The company’s retelling includes a server who was less enthusiastic about the exercise. Entrepreneurship, apparently, can create an immediate problem for the laundry.
It is a pleasingly untidy beginning for a company devoted to helping other companies prepare for trouble. Fusion was founded in 2006, with Nolan, Jackson, Bob Sibik and Victor Fricas among its founding team. The question behind it was serious: how could organizations understand their operations well enough to keep delivering when something stopped working?
Nolan would spend years returning to that question. He brought the perspective of a technology executive, the education of a mechanical engineer and a particular impatience with risk management that produced elaborate descriptions without helping anyone decide what to do. A business could catalogue its exposures and still disappoint a customer on Tuesday.
A tablecloth, then a system
Before Fusion, Nolan had held executive positions at Comdisco, Alternative Resources, Telenisus and Forsythe. His degree was a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering from Villanova University. His professional world became technology, continuity and the practical business of keeping organizations functioning.
That background matters because Fusion emerged from people who already knew the work. Level Equity later described founders who had turned their consulting practice into a software product. There is a substantial distance between giving an organization good advice and building a system it can use repeatedly. Advice can depend on the expert in the room. Software has to help when that person has left.
The Fusion Framework System launched in 2010. Its approach put connected information at the center of continuity work: understanding operations, recording relationships and making those relationships useful when decisions had to be made. The ambition was to give practitioners a working picture of a business, with enough detail to see where disruption would travel.
In his own writing about preparedness, Nolan challenged the comfort executives can take from having a documented plan. A plan needs to remain accurate and usable. Otherwise, the existence of the document tells you remarkably little about the organization’s ability to execute it. A neatly filed answer can still be the wrong answer.
promised?
to deliver it?
something fails?
A conceptual reading of Nolan’s continuity philosophy.
The supplier behind the supplier
His examples make the idea easier to grasp than the terminology does. In a 2018 discussion of supply chains, Nolan described the limits of looking only at direct suppliers or their financial standing. A vendor can be solvent and still depend on one vulnerable factory. Its customer inherits that dependency whether or not anyone has put it on a spreadsheet.
He recounted a client that had concentrated on suppliers providing at least $100 million in materials. A closer examination revealed that a single ingredient appeared in $8 billion worth of the client’s product. The conspicuous purchasing relationships had drawn attention; the ingredient carried a different kind of consequence. Those figures describe Nolan’s client example, rather than Fusion’s revenue.
The lesson is specific. Spending tells a purchasing department one thing. The consequences of losing an input tell an operations team another. Understanding the business requires following both. Nolan’s attention repeatedly goes to the connection between an apparently small dependency and a much larger obligation.
“I’ve never met an executive who wanted to guess.”
David Nolan, 2018
In another 2018 account, he described a Florida client preparing for a hurricane. The business modeled possible paths and adjusted shipping so its supplies stayed outside potential impact areas. Preparation changed a decision before the disruption arrived. It is the sort of success that leaves comparatively little spectacle: the goods simply avoid the wrong place.
He grouped operational disruption into four useful categories: workplace, workforce, supply and technology. The categories make a sprawling subject more manageable. The important follow-up is how the loss affects delivery. A damaged facility and an unavailable system are different events, but either can leave the same customer waiting.
Nolan’s four disruption categories, explained in plain language.
A business that had to grow up
Fusion itself needed resources to turn its ideas into a larger operation. Level Equity led an $8 million minority investment in December 2014, its first institutional investment. Further transactions brought Catalyst Investors in 2017, Vista Equity Partners in 2019 and Great Hill Partners in 2023 into the company’s investment history.
Nolan’s February 2016 update offers a view of the earlier acceleration. Looking back on 2015, he reported that Fusion had doubled its staff, increased sales by 77 percent and introduced three major product releases. These were his reported figures for that period. Growth meant adding people, improving the product and attending to the less glamorous back-office work at the same time.
Historical figures reported by Nolan in February 2016.
By June 2017, Fusion had raised $41 million in another funding milestone. The business was becoming larger than the founding conversation, as successful businesses tend to do. Customers needed more from the software; the organization needed more people and clearer responsibilities. Keeping the early purpose intelligible becomes its own kind of management task.
September 2019 brought a change at the top. Michael Campbell became CEO, and Nolan became strategic advisor. His remit included product strategy, customer success, corporate development and culture. The announcement presented the move as an expansion of the executive team for the next stage of growth. Nolan remained involved in the work he had helped begin.
Blue hair belongs in this story
Corporate culture becomes interesting when someone supplies an example. Crystal Montufar did. Recalling her arrival at Fusion, she described having blue hair and being welcomed by Nolan, then the company’s CEO. He liked it, and he wanted her to feel able to be herself at work.
The recollection is small enough to be credible as a human encounter. It also gives substance to Nolan’s continuing interest in culture. An executive can speak warmly about individual perspectives; a new employee learns more from the way that executive actually responds to her. Montufar remembered the welcome as unusual in her corporate experience.
There is a connection here to the problem Nolan identified in crisis management. He worried about executives who heard only agreeable information and employees who feared carrying bad news upward. A company’s information system includes the conversations people feel able to have. A dashboard cannot display a problem that everyone has quietly decided to withhold.
The customer community supplied another venue for conversation. At Solutions 2019 in Chicago, Nolan delivered the opening welcome before keynote speaker John Iannarelli. The summit brought together clients and practitioners for sessions, discussions and time together. The event included more than 50 speakers and 40 breakout sessions. For a software company, learning how customers use the product is part of the work.
A gift that went back to the beginning
The 2017 funding milestone also produced a personal decision. Nolan and his wife, Nikki, donated $125,000 toward an entrepreneurship program at Villanova. They had met at the university roughly four decades earlier. That year also marked their thirty-fifth wedding anniversary. Business, marriage and the place where they first knew each other briefly occupied the same paragraph.
The gift belongs in his story because it is a documented choice about what to do with a moment of success. Villanova had supplied his engineering education and the setting for a lasting personal connection. The couple’s contribution supported entrepreneurship at that same institution. An earlier beginning became part of the next generation’s opportunity.
His older company-submitted biography supplies a few less ceremonial details: family time, a Labrador retriever, golf and support for the Chicago Blackhawks. They are modest particulars, but welcome ones in a career surrounded by the language of enterprise systems. Even someone who studies disruption professionally is allowed an afternoon with a golf club.
The promise after the title
In March 2020, Fusion announced Nolan’s Lifetime Achievement Award from DRI International. The award was decided by an online vote of DRI Certified Professionals. He had also received the BCI Gifted Grades MBCI designation in 2015. Both recognitions place his contribution within the professional community that had watched the work develop.
For Fusion’s fifteenth anniversary in 2021, Nolan returned to the founding ambition: helping organizations fulfill their brand promises through good conditions and adversity. The company’s current team page continues to list him as founder and strategic advisor. The CEO title has changed hands; that central interest has remained recognizable.
There is a useful consistency between the restaurant beginning and the later career. The initial sketch needed to become something other people could use. The growing company needed to preserve the purpose behind the product. The businesses buying it needed to understand the connections supporting their own commitments. Nolan’s subject has always required attention to what happens after the promise is made.
A customer rarely cares how elegant the continuity plan looks. The delivery still needs to arrive. That ordinary expectation gives Nolan’s work its stakes, and its enduring test.