Taylor Justice and the art of following through

Taylor Justice has spent years asking what happens after somebody is given a name and a telephone number. A referral looks respectable on paper. It has an address, perhaps opening hours, and the reassuring appearance of progress. Then somebody has to make the call. Justice’s career grew out of paying attention to that next, less photogenic part.

He encountered it while volunteering with veterans in Philadelphia. A person might need work, somewhere to live, and help putting food on the table. Different organizations could address different parts of the problem. Coordinating them involved calls, emails, and the sort of administrative improvisation that makes a simple request feel like a second occupation.

In 2013, he co-founded Unite Us. In October 2025, he became its chief executive, succeeding fellow co-founder Dan Brillman. The distance between those dates includes a business degree, years as president, and the awkward business of turning an observation into something organizations would actually use. The observation itself remains admirably plain: passing a request along leaves unfinished work.

A family that made things work

Justice grew up in Kentucky in a large family, then moved to Fort Myers, Florida, at twelve. Enterprise was already part of the family scenery. His great-grandparents ran a tobacco and cattle farm. His grandfather operated an engineering company. His mother started an embroidery business in Florida. There were several examples nearby of people making their own living.

He has described kindness, hard work, and humility as values reinforced in both places. Founding a company, however, was not his childhood career plan. His early ambitions included professional basketball. Florida introduced football into the story, and football eventually helped take him to West Point. The route to the executive chair began with a rather different set of chairs on the sidelines.

That background gives the later entrepreneur some useful texture. The family businesses were tangible enterprises, with work to finish and people to answer to. His sporting interests gave him a setting for learning about leadership and team dynamics. Neither detail makes his eventual company inevitable. They make the person who started it easier to recognize.

The team before the company

Justice graduated from the United States Military Academy in 2006 and was commissioned as an Army infantry officer. At West Point, he also played football. His studies included Latin American studies and environmental engineering, an academic combination broad enough to discourage anyone hoping for a tidy explanation of his later career.

He left the military in 2007 and entered civilian business life. The West Point network helped him find his first job in Philadelphia. That assistance matters to the story because Justice had experienced what a useful connection could do. A network could turn an uncertain next step into a practical introduction. He subsequently became involved in helping other veterans establish their own connections.

His early commercial work included sales roles and a position at the communications technology company JDSU. He also co-founded HigherEchelon, a firm working on human and organizational performance, with software engineering among its specialties. Unite Us therefore followed an earlier stretch of learning how organizations buy, how people work together, and how a company earns its place in somebody else’s budget.

His volunteer responsibilities grew too. He helped build the Philadelphia chapter of Team Red, White & Blue, serving as its chapter captain from 2012 to 2014. He later recalled a group that had expanded from roughly five people to more than 600. With more people came requests beyond the group’s immediate activities. The telephone started doing rather more work.

An admissions conversation with consequences

Business school provided the introduction that changed the scale of his work. While Justice was considering Columbia, a veterans connection paired him with Brillman to discuss the program. Brillman, an Air Force reservist, had been thinking about the same difficulty from his own experience helping service members. He had been working on a paper about fragmented services.

Their first conversation lasted for hours. It is an appealing origin because the introduction had a perfectly ordinary purpose. Somebody wanted to learn about a school. The participants happened to have a problem in common, and enough interest to keep talking about it after the admissions questions were exhausted.

Justice went on to earn his Columbia MBA in 2014. By then, Unite Us had already been founded. In his advice about choosing a business school, he has emphasized relationships and what students learn from one another. His own experience supplies an unusually concrete illustration. A connection made through the school became a business partnership with consequences well beyond the campus.

The unfinished business of a referral

The company began with veterans and military families, then broadened its reach to other communities. Its central concern was coordination: organizations needed a way to work around the same person, follow a request, and establish whether a service had been delivered. The product asks the sender to remain interested in the ending.

Consider the difference between suggesting a local service and receiving confirmation that an organization has accepted a referral. Justice has explained the process using everyday examples such as food assistance, housing, employment, and transportation. A shared system can show the handoff, the response, and the result. That gives participating organizations something firmer to act on than the hope that a message arrived.

The arrangement also demands work from the organizations themselves. They agree to respond, maintain information, and report outcomes. Software supplies a place for that coordination; people still have to participate. The business therefore depends on relationships and operating habits as well as the product. A beautifully designed button cannot, by itself, persuade another organization to answer.

No rules, plenty of preparation

Justice’s entrepreneurial credo has a slightly mischievous sound coming from a West Point graduate: “There are no rules.” He has used the phrase when discussing how a founder’s path differs from established professional routes. Finance and consulting offer recognizable sequences of steps. Building a company can require deciding what the steps ought to be.

There is preparation behind that freedom. He has described carrying military standards into meetings and working relationships: arrive ready, pay attention to details, and understand what the group needs to accomplish. The combination is revealing. He wants room to invent an approach while still expecting the people carrying it out to do their homework.

“There are no rules.”

Taylor Justice, on entrepreneurship

He has also given advice so practical that it deserves a place beside the more expansive credo: make agreements explicit when working with people you know. Personal relationships and business expectations can become tangled. His recommendation is to establish boundaries and get the arrangement on paper. Friendship, apparently, benefits from a little clerical assistance.

That willingness to discuss unglamorous details runs through his later accounts of the company. In an April 2026 conversation, he revisited an early product that missed the mark, the strain of rapid expansion, and two acquisitions within sixty days. Founding stories tend to become tidier with age. Justice has left some of the crossed-out working visible.

A familiar founder, a different chair

The October 28, 2025 announcement made the succession official: Justice would become CEO, and Brillman would leave the company for a new role. It was a change between people who had spent twelve years building the same business. For Justice, the title brought a different responsibility within an organization he already knew from its earliest days.

His stated priorities included improving the customer experience, expanding the company’s reach, and strengthening its national infrastructure. These are operating commitments that require repetition. A network has to remain useful after the announcement has passed, when partners need a response and employees need decisions. The work continues on days with no milestone to celebrate.

He has remained connected to veteran communities beyond the company. His public profile lists an advisory role with Hero Hut, which brings veterans together around community and service. A 2024 conversation with fellow West Point graduates also touched on TAF Capital, a venture created with classmates. The relationships established through military life continue into other parts of his civilian work.

The golf balls decline to cooperate

Outside work, Justice’s interests include documentaries and the histories of successful leaders. His company biography also makes room for witty company and life in New York with his wife, Meghan. For somebody who spends so much time discussing coordination, he seems happy to leave a few hours for watching other people’s stories unfold.

Golf supplies a more active diversion. A friend invited him to play, and four hours outside proved persuasive. He has cheerfully described himself as poor at the game, drawn back by the challenge of his swing and the course. His account offers a welcome departure from the executive hobby that mysteriously becomes another achievement.

“I lose more balls than I keep.”

Taylor Justice, on golf

The former football player enjoys a game that keeps presenting him with something difficult to figure out. There is no need to burden it with a grand theory of leadership. It is enough to picture the ambition meeting the swing, and the ball reserving the right to disagree. Even a chief executive must occasionally go looking for the thing he has just sent somewhere.