For Firms & Recruiters

A senior operator for your bench.

Available for part-time and fractional consulting engagements in operations, organizational development, strategic planning, and practical AI integration. Twenty-five years leading large organizations, and now running AI-built operations in a company I built myself.

Derek Hoffman, operations, strategy and AI integration consultant
At a Glance

What I bring to a client engagement

180+ people
Global office led at NGA, with a $100M annual budget
85 → 150
Engineering firm guided through its growth plan
$20M+ a year
Moved off legacy systems onto cloud platforms
7 years
Teaching leadership at NGA's college
Capabilities

Where firms can put me to work

Operations

Process and operating-model redesign

Map how work actually moves, find the bottlenecks, handoff failures and founder dependencies, and redesign the workflow and decision rights so the business scales without adding headcount at the same rate.

AI Integration

Practical AI inside real operations

Assess which processes are worth automating, then design and stand up the tools: monitoring, reporting, CRM data work, document handling, and internal assistants. Built for how a small or mid-sized team actually works, with data-handling rules in place.

Organization

Organizational development and strategic planning

Executive-session analysis, findings, and an execution roadmap across finance, recruiting, HR, culture, communications, and structure. Growth and transition planning for companies outgrowing their current shape.

Leadership

Leadership development and change

Seven years building and teaching leadership curriculum for a US intelligence agency. Executive coaching, facilitation, and change management through growth, restructuring, and succession.

Governance

Boards, governance and succession

Board-level strategic planning, bylaws modernization, and founder or CEO succession, including co-leading a CEO selection when an organization's founders retired.

Information Security

A security mindset for AI adoption

Twenty-five years in the intelligence community and DoD. When a client brings AI into its operations, I start with what data goes where, who can see it, and what the rules are.

AI in Practice

I run my own company on an AI operating layer I designed.

At Ignite Performance & Health, I designed and deployed the systems that run clinical operations, client management, quality control, and marketing, built with AI and without a development team or an outside agency. They work every day on real operations, with patient information kept inside its proper, controlled systems. This is the same work I bring to clients.

Clinical Operations

Medication refill management system →

Monitors every incoming refill channel and turns each request into a case. It populates a provider review dashboard with everything needed to make the medical decision, then tracks the request from intake through fulfillment, cradle to grave, so nothing stalls between inbox, provider, and pharmacy.

Clinical Decision Support

Automated lab intelligence and protocol management →

Automatically ingests all lab reporting for every client and presents the provider with a prioritized dashboard, organized against standing orders and medical director instructions, with recommended protocol adjustments for the provider to accept or change. Once the provider decides, the system updates each patient's chart with the new protocol and routine.

Client Management

Custom enterprise CRM integration →

Purpose-built interfaces on top of an enterprise CRM: client-journey tracking from first inquiry through active care, role-specific dashboards for the owner and each team member, automated follow-up and outreach queues, and data-quality routines that keep one accurate record for every client.

Quality Control

Continuing evaluation and monitoring agents →

A set of agents that run every night across the business's systems and automations. They verify that every scheduled process fired, test outputs for errors, catch failures before staff or clients do, and deliver a plain-language morning report with what broke, what was fixed, and what needs a decision.

Marketing

An in-house AI marketing firm →

I replaced the outside agency with a team of AI agents and serve as the creative director. A website management agent runs the company site and ad landing pages, with continuous performance and optimization checks and one consistent look and feel. A search agent manages SEO and AI-search (AEO) visibility. Advertising agents research, plan, and run the Google Ads and Meta campaigns with me. Every lead from every channel flows automatically into the CRM.

Proof

Selected engagements

Advisory Board — CDG Engineers

Scaling an engineering firm from 85 toward 150

Ran the organizational-development analysis behind the firm's strategic growth plan and joined its advisory board when the process ended.

Executive Board — CHADS Coalition

Founder succession

Co-led the CEO selection and succession when the founders retired; rebuilt the 3-, 5-, and 10-year outlooks and updated the bylaws.

Owner — Ignite Performance & Health

Built from zero in 2024

A medically directed strength, nutrition, and hormone clinic in Chesterfield, Missouri. I run the whole business side: sales, operations, billing, partnerships, and the team.

National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency

Fifteen years of increasing scope

Led a global office of 180+ people and a $100M budget, enterprise transformation onto the cloud, and readiness for a 1,000-person campus move. Finished as Senior GEOINT Officer for Political Geography.

Credentials

Background

Working Together

How I work with firms

I take part-time and fractional engagements, as a 1099 or subcontracted consultant under your contract. Your firm owns the client relationship; I follow your methods, reporting, and client-contact rules. Remote, or on-site in the St. Louis region, with travel by arrangement.

What kinds of engagements do you take?

Operations and process redesign, organizational development, strategic growth planning, leadership development, and practical AI integration, typically for privately held companies and nonprofits in growth or transition.

Do you work through consulting firms and expert networks?

Yes. That's what this page is for. I work under your contract and your client relationship.

Can you lead the AI work hands-on, or only advise?

Both. I assess where AI is worth using, and I build and run the tools myself, as I do in my own company.

Where are you located?

Chesterfield, Missouri, in the St. Louis area.