At Precision Diagnostics, the problem arrived before the ownership changes did. A private equity firm was preparing to withdraw. An acquisition was possible. Inside the laboratory testing business, anxiety was already doing its work. Leaders needed to explain a future that was still taking shape. HigherEchelon’s response began with analysis, then a two-day workshop and 360-degree assessments. Coaching continued through a six-month engagement. The interesting detail is the calendar: the workshop ended; the practice continued.
- Combines leadership development with engineering, cyber services, enterprise technology, and educational games.
- Uses assessment, rehearsal, and coaching to help people perform through change.
- Sold its Salesforce practice to Cherokee Federal in a deal announced in October 2025.
The client’s COO described learning the value of “taking a pause now.” That is a wonderfully awkward thing to sell to a busy executive. HigherEchelon taught feedback, difficult conversations, self-awareness, and stress management. Its account describes leaders applying those tools during the transition. The lesson a reader can borrow is specific: when uncertainty changes how people behave, schedule opportunities to practice the conversations that uncertainty makes difficult.
“taking a pause now”
Precision Diagnostics COO, on a lesson from the training
A football captain’s second playbook
HigherEchelon began in 2009. Co-founder Joe Ross brought an unusually coherent set of experiences: West Point, Army football, infantry leadership, athletic counseling, and organizational psychology. He co-captained Army’s 1994 football team. Later, he directed the Military Enhancement Program, working on the mental and emotional skills of military performance. The company’s Resilient and Adaptable Leader methodology grew from that concern with what people do when pressure arrives.
Co-founder Paul Maggiano supplied another kind of fluency. A former Army Blackhawk pilot, he had led customer relationship management programs at The Carlyle Group and Oldcastle. His background connected business processes, Salesforce implementation, training, and change management. Together, the founders offered a useful pairing: understanding the person asked to change, and understanding the system that person would have to use.
That combination places HigherEchelon between leadership development firms and technical services contractors. A buyer can hire it for coaching, a virtual trainer, engineering support, or a technology modernization project. The distinctive proposition is the ability to connect those assignments. Its stated mission is to deliver training and technology that support mission success. The practical question underneath is whether better prepared people and better designed systems can improve the same piece of work.
Identify the real challenge. Precision Diagnostics began with front-end analysis and 360-degree assessments.
The whiteboard learns to move
Consider GoArmy Edge Football, an application HigherEchelon helped develop with Army Game Studio. A coach draws a play in a two-dimensional editor. Players can then watch it unfold in a three-dimensional environment. A diagram becomes something a player can mentally inhabit. An opponent’s formation can be modeled against the team’s own. Repetition becomes available without another collision on the practice field.
The apps are offered free; HigherEchelon also sells training, integration expertise, and custom development. That distinction explains the business better than a software subscription analogy. The value can sit in helping a coach use a tool, or in building a simulation around a customer’s particular training problem. The company supports serious games and virtual trainers using commercial game engines, including Unity and Unreal, for situations where physical practice can be dangerous, expensive, or difficult to reproduce.
Its work includes support for Army Game Studio trainers covering crew operations and weapons systems. Procurify, developed with support from HigherEchelon, Army Game Studio, and SAIC, won the 2022 Serious Games Showcase & Challenge award for Best Government Audience Game. Procurement training may sound like an unlikely setting for a game. It makes sense once learning to make a decision becomes the design brief.
What practice costs
HigherEchelon earns its money through professional services: workshops, assessments, coaching, technical delivery, and government engagements. Its published Resilient and Adaptable Leader menu lists one-day group programs at $11,995, two days at $21,990, and three days at $31,985. Those are group prices. A separate executive coaching menu lists eight-session individual programs from $2,995 to $6,475, depending on coach level, with coach travel excluded.
Advertised group prices, not per-person rates or the cost of the Precision Diagnostics engagement.
The customer mix reflects that breadth. Published work includes Precision Diagnostics, the U.S. Forest Service, Veterans Affairs leadership coaching, and Army cyber training. Its capabilities materials also identify commercial clients including Merck and eBay. These assignments span different purchasing worlds: a commercial leader developing managers, a public agency reorganizing, and a defense organization preparing specialists. Shared vocabulary helps, but the actual work still has to fit the customer’s mission.
The Salesforce chapter changed hands
On October 7, 2025, Cherokee Federal announced an agreement to acquire HigherEchelon’s Salesforce practice, effective November 1. The practice had completed more than 120 implementations over six years. This was a sale of a practice, rather than an acquisition of the whole company. Maggiano said the move would let HigherEchelon concentrate on human capital, cyber training, engineering support, and educational gaming. Read through that lens, the transaction clarified the business’s center of gravity.
Current service pages still include enterprise technology: cloud transformation, application modernization, systems integration, data work, and automation. The company also describes engineering and software development across a program’s lifecycle. Its market position therefore remains broader than a training boutique. Buyers evaluating alternatives should compare the particular assignment: an executive coach, a specialist simulation developer, and a federal systems contractor solve different slices of the problem.
The useful part is the repetition
Inside the company, the stated values are Learn, Grow, Adapt, and Lead. Its recognition includes a place on Fortune’s 2022 Best Workplaces in Consulting & Professional Services list and the Huntsville chamber’s 2023 Engineering/Defense Business of the Year award in the medium-size category. These markers speak to a business trying to apply its performance language internally as well as sell it externally.
For a reader, the copyable move is modest: identify a difficult behavior, create a realistic opportunity to rehearse it, and revisit it after the workshop. The limit follows from the same logic. Coaching needs time and participation; a simulation needs relevant scenarios. If managers cannot practice between sessions, or the digital rehearsal bears little resemblance to the real decision, the learning has a weak route into work. HigherEchelon’s most interesting idea lives in that route: arranging the next repetition.