James Clarke and the trouble with coming home

When James Clarke returned to Clearlink, he found a peculiarity of corporate life: a company can still contain your name while making you feel like a stranger. He had founded the business, sold it, and come back a decade later. The employees who made it run had their own experience of the place. Founding it was part of his introduction. He still had to persuade them he belonged.

That is an awkward homecoming for anyone. For Clarke, the connection was unusually personal. Clearlink’s name combined his surname with his wife Andrea’s maiden name, Earl, and a corporate ending. The family was practically in the stationery. Yet a company can acquire new owners, new habits and an entirely different working life while the lettering stays put.

His return as CEO in January 2022 began a second tenure that would include a new headquarters, a disputed office mandate and another departure in 2025. Around that business story sits another: an Idaho upbringing, investment partnerships, university service and a family foundation named for a motto he had known since childhood. Work keeps turning up. So does the question of what work asks of other people.

The company with two surnames

Clarke grew up in Rexburg, in southeast Idaho. Agriculture supplied early jobs even though his own family were not farmers. The family crest supplied the instruction: labor and honor belonged together. His aunt Sybil added an example of business success accompanied by giving. Money had destinations beyond its owner.

Before online commerce, he sold satellite dishes door to door. It was an education in customers conducted on the customer’s doorstep, where a rejected pitch required no committee meeting. His early working circle included Todd Pedersen, Ryan Smith and Sean Clark. Utah’s entrepreneurial connections were being made in shared offices, before the familiar company names acquired their later scale.

Clearlink began on November 1, 2001, in the aftermath of the dot-com collapse. James and Andrea were building a family alongside the business. She supplied the household income while he worked on the venture; by May 2003, its profits could replace her salary. The first meaningful financial milestone was close to home.

The digital opportunity was practical: help customers find and buy services online. Clearlink became a channel partner for brands including AT&T, Comcast, DirecTV and ADT. Between a large brand and a customer sat a useful business problem: explaining the offer and completing the sale. Clarke built a company in that space.

An exit with a return address

In 2011, Clarke sold Clearlink to Pamlico Capital. He then put money and operating experience into other ventures through Clarke Capital Partners. Contour, the action-camera business, and PetIQ were early investments. Different products, different customers, the same recurring interest in how a company could grow.

His education had also taken a route beyond a conventional undergraduate timetable. He completed Harvard Business School’s Owner/President Management program in 2007 and earned an Oxford master’s degree in Major Programme Management in 2012. The first was executive education for business owners. The second brought a formal qualification in managing complex programs. Both fit a career already spent inside organizations.

Investment gave him some distance from Clearlink. It also gave him partners with whom to return. Sykes bought the company in 2016; Sitel subsequently acquired Sykes. The opportunity for Clarke’s group was to take an interest in Clearlink and responsibility for running it while Sitel retained majority ownership.

The January 2022 partnership put Clarke back in the CEO and chairman roles, with James Harrison as president and James Thayer overseeing operations. It was a negotiated arrangement between businesses, with several people doing the work of bringing it together. A founder’s attachment helped explain the interest. The transaction still needed partners.

Clarke had changed during his years away. So had Clearlink. He arrived with experience from other companies and a strong belief in working alongside people in person. Many of the people he was returning to lead had been working remotely. The difficulty was already present in that difference of experience.

When the office became the argument

In February 2023, Clearlink’s new headquarters gave that belief a physical address. The company leased 135,000 square feet in Draper. There were conference facilities and a cafeteria, and a location intended to help recruit employees and meet clients. Clarke saw the move as a commercial advantage. An office lease is a considerable expression of confidence in the office.

In April, employees living within 50 miles were told to work there four days a week. An internal town hall about the change became public. Clarke questioned some remote employees’ work habits and discussed a worker who, he said, had sold the family dog to accommodate the return. His praise for the sacrifice helped turn a workplace policy into an international argument.

His comments about mothers combining employment with caregiving drew criticism too. The immediate dispute concerned a commute and a schedule. The larger issue was whether the people making those changes felt understood by the person requiring them. A founder can know exactly how much a business has cost him and still misjudge what a decision will cost an employee.

Clearlink defended its plans for employees to work together. Clarke later acknowledged in an open letter that his remarks had caused apprehension and distress. The episode belongs alongside his statements about the importance of people. Readers can see both the intention he described and the reaction his words produced.

“Our strategy is the people.”

James Clarke, reflecting on building Clearlink, 2022

The sentence is short enough to fit on a wall. Putting it into practice involves many more conversations. In Clarke’s case, the public record includes gratitude toward colleagues, enthusiasm for mentoring and a meeting that left employees and outside observers questioning his approach. Those facts make the second tenure more revealing than a simple account of a founder returning to familiar ground.

A different kind of return

At Utah Valley University, Clarke’s work took a different form. He joined the Board of Trustees in 2014 and became its chair in June 2021, after serving as vice chair. He had also chaired the university’s Foundation Board. These were positions with responsibilities for an institution that would continue beyond any particular trustee.

One project gave students something closer to the decisions he made professionally. Under his foundation board leadership, a task force explored ways to connect the endowment with the entrepreneurial community. The resulting Wolverine Fund offered undergraduates experience investing donated money, researching companies and conducting due diligence. Students could study a business and then face the inconvenience of deciding what they actually thought of it.

His interest in UVU also came from hiring its graduates. He valued their appetite to learn and their readiness to contribute. That is a specific reason for a business owner to support a university: he had encountered its work through the people arriving at his companies.

In 2018, James and Andrea donated $5 million to UVU. The university renamed its Classroom Building the Andrea and James Clarke Building. In February 2023, it recognized both with honorary alumni awards. His trustee service ended that year; Andrea joined the board as the university announced its next group of trustees.

The couple’s Labor and Honor Foundation supports education, poverty alleviation and the arts. The family motto became the name of an organization with work to do. At Clearlink, a 2022 giving initiative included employee volunteering and matching donations, seeded by a $100,000 contribution from the Clarkes. Giving had a place in the company’s plans as well as in their private foundation.

Another connection led across the Atlantic. Clarke serves as the United Kingdom’s honorary consul in Utah. Oxford is part of that relationship, along with British business partnerships and family ancestry. His namesake great-great-grandfather came from Clifford, England. The role gives a public purpose to ties that had already become personal.

After the second goodbye

In 2025, Clarke announced that he and Clearlink president Tyler Hartmann were stepping away. His message thanked employees, described repeated changes in direction and emphasized the difficulty of the market. Clearlink, in its own farewell, credited the Clarke Capital team’s work on the business and its support for the incoming management group.

He continues as founder and managing partner of Clarke Capital Partners. In a March 2026 interview, he discussed a growth-equity approach centered on businesses already producing earnings, lessons from mentors, and the effect of AI and Google’s changing economics on Clearlink. The conversation returned to execution: what happens after the meeting, the pitch and the agreeable lunch.

That is where the story leaves him, beyond his second departure from the company with the family name. He has been its founder, its seller and its returning chief executive. Each role offered a different relationship with the people inside it. The name could carry his history through all three. The working relationship had to be made again.