Eric Newell has a business plan for the daily aggravation

Eric Newell has an unusually practical complaint for someone in the business of selling technology: work ought to be less irritating. The tools should be available. The information should be within reach. People should be able to finish the thing they sat down to do. Anyone who has spent a morning negotiating with a business system may regard this as an ambitious programme of reform.

Newell put the complaint plainly in a 2021 essay: “I hate to be frustrated at work.” His career gives the sentence some weight. He had spent years inside Great Plains Software and Microsoft before co-founding Stoneridge Software in 2012. He had seen business applications from the support side, where the gap between a promising system and a difficult working day becomes rather hard to ignore.

Today, as Stoneridge’s CEO, he works in an industry whose vocabulary can make ordinary concerns sound forbiddingly expensive. Enterprise resource planning. Customer relationship management. Implementation. Beneath the initials are people trying to know what they sold, what they owe, and what happens next. His story is most interesting when it stays close to those people.

Thirteen years before the leap

Newell graduated from the University of Minnesota Morris in 1996, with studies in management, French, and economics. It was a broad preparation for someone who had imagined becoming an international businessman. His first professional setting was considerably closer to home: a regulatory analyst’s job in Fergus Falls, Minnesota.

There, he began digitizing office forms and applications. The attraction was the improvement itself: a process that could be made easier with technology. In 1999, he joined Great Plains Software, which Microsoft acquired in 2001. Over the following years, his work moved through support, systems, account management, and leadership.

He eventually led the North American Premier Field Engineering practice for Dynamics. A support career offers a particular education in software. It exposes the places where assumptions meet an actual organization. The difficult part may arrive well after a purchase decision, when people discover how many other decisions the purchase requires.

Wiley’s account of his career includes work as a support engineer, an IT lead for support systems, and a technical account manager. Those roles put him near both the machinery and its users. They also gave the future founder time to understand the organization around a product, including the sales work he later said he would have underestimated earlier in his career.

A company with room to stay

In October 2012, Newell co-founded Stoneridge with his wife, Becky, and Cody Marshall. The business began in Barnesville, Minnesota. A company serving Microsoft business applications clients could be built there; that proposition became part of the venture’s character.

Barnesville also had a place in Newell’s civic life. He served as chair of its Economic Development Authority and helped encourage local entrepreneurship through a business pitch programme. Building a company and encouraging other people to build one were related interests, pursued at different scales.

Stoneridge’s expansion would include acquisitions as well as new work. In January 2018, DFC Consultants brought 18 team members and 225 clients into the firm. Newell’s review of that year also counted projects with 166 clients, including 60 the company was working with for the first time. Expansion meant bringing more relationships into the operation, with the obligations each relationship carries.

In March 2025, Stoneridge added TEAM Technology to its Business Central practice. Eight employees and dozens of clients joined through that acquisition, which took effect on March 1. The announcement emphasized shared priorities around clients and employees. For a consulting business, those priorities become visible in who answers questions and how a project proceeds.

A little impatience, properly supervised

Newell’s writing about culture is refreshingly concerned with the working day. In his essay on workplace frustration, he describes noticing at Microsoft how people wanted to leave teams full of aggravations, while teams with fewer obstacles attracted interest. At Stoneridge, he wanted people to have ready access to the tools, data, and colleagues they needed.

There is a companion argument in his essay about impatient people. He likes their inclination to act and their willingness to try something, learn, and improve it. He also supplies the caveats. Speed can become careless. An eager colleague can leave others out of decisions. A manager can demand a deadline without listening to a legitimate reason it slipped.

This makes his enthusiasm more useful than a simple celebration of urgency. He argues for coaching, feedback, and a balance of temperaments. An organization staffed entirely by people who want everything finished yesterday would have a lively calendar and, one suspects, some rather trying meetings.

“I hate to be frustrated at work.”

Eric Newell, writing in 2021

The connection to his business is straightforward. A company helping others adopt new systems has to think about the people affected by the change. The colleague who asks an awkward question early may be doing the project a considerable favour. Newell’s own argument makes room for that interruption, even when everyone is eager to proceed.

The instructions belong in the box

In 2021, Wiley published Newell’s Mastering Microsoft Dynamics 365 Implementations. At 416 pages, it leaves room for the less glamorous portions of a technology project. Its coverage includes building a business case, identifying stakeholders, managing change, and working through conference room pilots.

These are the sorts of subjects that become interesting very quickly when a project is yours. A new system affects routines, responsibilities, and expectations. A useful plan must account for the organization that will receive it. Newell’s book offers a sequence for that work, extending from preparation through completion.

His business interests also became more specific by industry. In 2018, he co-founded Levridge, a software company focused on agriculture business applications, and he serves as its board chair. It gave his experience with business systems another setting: an industry with its own operating requirements, rather than an interchangeable collection of software buyers.

A different sort of weekly meeting

In fall 2024, Newell returned to Morris to teach a two-credit entrepreneurship course. Eleven students met with him on Mondays. Their assignments included starting businesses: food delivery, cleaning, valuations, and dog treats. The semester ended with instruction on selling or closing the ventures.

He worked with his former professor, Bart Finzel, on the course design, and learned the university’s Canvas system with help from Social Sciences Division Chair Heather Peters. Even the visiting entrepreneur had some new software to learn.

“I just like the idea of giving back,” he explained. The course paired practical business responsibilities with the wider education he valued at Morris. Students could leave with experience to discuss when applying for work. The exercise had customers, paperwork, and a finish, which gave the classroom idea a useful amount of resistance.

The guitar gets a turn

There is another Newell online, although he is the same person: the musician. His mother taught music. He tried several instruments before learning guitar in college, and began writing songs around that time. His personal site describes three recorded albums.

In 2020, he began sharing cover-song videos with James Taylor’s Fire and Rain. One became a run of 100 consecutive days. By the end of the year, he had recorded 155 videos, including a set of Christmas songs. A hobby had acquired a fairly demanding production schedule.

The music adds something a professional biography tends to flatten. A chief executive can also be someone learning a song, choosing an arrangement, and putting a performance in front of other people. His personal YouTube channel leaves room for that interest to be heard on its own terms.

The next report should write itself

Newell’s recent work returns to the daily irritation with newer tools. In June 2026, he described automating Stoneridge’s CRM pipeline reporting. Previously, someone had to log in, run queries, and export information by hand. His walkthrough explains using Copilot Cowork and a scheduled Power Automate flow to create a daily archive in SharePoint.

The interesting decision came before the automation: defining which opportunities belonged in the report. Open, won, and lost business needed different views. The technology still required someone to decide what information would be useful. A fast answer becomes more valuable when the question has been properly considered.

He is also hosting Backstage Pass, a conversation series launched in 2025. An October 2026 discussion with Microsoft’s James Oleinik explored becoming ready for AI agents, including connections to business data and governance. His work has followed the technology into a new vocabulary while retaining a familiar concern: how an organization makes it useful.

For all the movement in business software, that concern gives Newell’s career continuity. Forms, implementations, classes, reports: each asks what needs to happen next and what is getting in the way. The ambition can sound modest until you consider how much of a working life is spent waiting for something that ought to have been simpler.