BrainDance Collective began long before it had a name. Its roots stretch from the farms and small businesses of the American South and Caribbean to the tennis courts of Macedonia two very different beginnings that ultimately shaped the same belief:
BrainDance Collective began long before it had a name. Its roots stretch from the farms and small businesses of the American South and Caribbean to the tennis courts of a war-torn Yugoslavia two working-class families with little money or resources, and a tough start neither would trade for an easy one.
Two very different beginnings that shaped the same belief: Opportunity is rarely handed to you. It has to be imagined, built and relentlessly pursued.
BrainDance exists to turn possibility into performance, and performance into lasting value. For entrepreneurs, that means scaling and building enterprise value. For corporate leaders and investors, it means finding the operational alpha hidden inside organizations. For government executives, it means bringing that same rigor to mission outcomes, implementing efficiencies and helping public institutions do more for the people they serve.
BrainDance is built around leaders who’ve been accountable for outcomes, not just observers of them. Our teammates have owned businesses, advised with measurable results, or run major operations. We look for the change-oriented and intellectually curious, who share our belief that expertise carries an obligation to use it well.
We also believe the qualities that make someone exceptional rarely come from a résumé alone. The discipline built through family, competition, service and life outside the office shapes judgment as much as any title, and we believe that’s often what makes sustained, high-level performance possible.
Tracy through grandfathers who built farms, homes and businesses with their own hands, and Ivona through a childhood in war-torn Yugoslavia, where she and her twin sister used relentless drive and SEC Division I tennis scholarships as their ticket out at 18, turning student visas into work visas, work visas into U.S. citizenship, and citizenship into careers across investment banking, consulting and executive leadership at firms like Ernst & Young and Booz Allen Hamilton.
Across decades in strategy, finance, technology, transformation and government, Tracy and Ivona advised major corporations and public institutions, worked inside multibillion-dollar enterprises, and eventually became entrepreneurs themselves. That last experience changed how they consult today: there’s a difference between recommending change and making payroll, between proposing growth and creating it, between analyzing risk and carrying it yourself.
Both founders’ paths converged on the same country and the same conviction: America is where imagination and grit still translate into opportunity. That gratitude isn’t abstract, it drives a real commitment to the government agencies and U.S. businesses BrainDance serves, helping them solve complex problems, modernize responsibly and grow with the same resilience that built this firm.
Across decades in strategy, finance, technology, transformation and government, Tracy and Ivona advised major corporations and public institutions, worked inside multibillion-dollar enterprises, and eventually became entrepreneurs themselves. That last experience changed how they consult today: there’s a difference between recommending change and making payroll, between proposing growth and creating it, between analyzing risk and carrying it yourself.
Paying Forward What Others Invested in Us. One generation built farms, homes and stores. Another father sat in corporate lobbies, betting on the potential of two seven-year-old girls. Those investments in possibility eventually produced executives, consultants and entrepreneurs, and now we have the chance to invest in others the same way, not just with capital, but with knowledge.
That is why we built BrainDance Collective: to take decades of hard-earned experience, codify it into repeatable playbooks, pair it with emerging technology, and put it in the hands of leaders facing their own defining moments. Circumstances may define where you start. They don’t have to define what you build, or the impact you ultimately make.
Tracy grew up influenced by grandfathers who created opportunity with their own hands. One was a farmer, home builder and plumber. His Caribbean grandfather was a gas station operator, importer and store owner. Neither would have called himself a strategist or entrepreneur. They simply saw needs, solved problems, created value and built something that could support their families and communities.
Beginning at age seven, the sisters trained seriously in a country with little tennis infrastructure. Their father refused to allow those circumstances to determine what was possible.
Much like Richard Williams envisioned a different future for Venus and Serena Williams, Ivona’s father saw opportunity where others saw limitations. Entrepreneurial and remarkably persistent, he approached corporations for sponsorship, sometimes sitting in corporate lobbies until someone would hear his case. He found the resources to send his daughters abroad to train and compete.
Those investments bought more than tennis lessons and airline tickets.
That example stayed with Tracy as his own career expanded into finance, technology, operations, government contracting, entrepreneurship, consulting and private equity eventually taking him from the Wharton School to executive leadership, business ownership and advising organizations navigating growth and transformation.
Ivona’s journey began thousands of miles away. She and her twin sister, Irene, grew up in Macedonia during a period of political and economic uncertainty in the Balkans. Their father believed tennis could become more than a sport for his daughters. It could become a pathway to a different future.
They bought possibility. Tennis ultimately brought Ivona to the United States, where she attended the University of Mississippi and studied business. Her career would later take her into major global organizations including Ernst & Young and Booz Allen Hamilton, exposing her to both the commercial world and the complex challenges of government—where success is measured not simply in financial returns, but in whether the mission is accomplished.
Over the decades that followed, Tracy and Ivona worked across strategy, finance, technology, operations, transformation, business development and government. They advised major corporations and public-sector organizations, worked with multibillion-dollar enterprises, and both ultimately became entrepreneurs themselves. That last experience shaped how they approach consulting today. There is a difference between recommending change and being responsible for making payroll. Between presenting a growth strategy and having to create the growth. Between analyzing an investment and putting your own capital and reputation at risk.
BrainDance exists to help leaders turn possibility into performance and performance into lasting value. For entrepreneurs, that can mean scaling a company, building enterprise value, preparing for investment or ultimately monetizing a lifetime of work. For corporate leaders and investors, it can mean finding operational alpha hidden inside organizations and translating strategy into measurable financial performance. For government executives, it means bringing the same rigor to a different bottom line: mission outcomes modernizing operations, improving decision-making, deploying technology responsibly and helping public institutions accomplish more for the people they serve.
Our origin story also shapes who we invite to join us. BrainDance is intentionally built around experienced leaders who have been accountable for outcomes not simply observers of them. Our team members bring at least one defining dimension of hands-on leadership: they have owned businesses, spent significant portions of their careers as independent advisors with measurable results, or held responsibility for leading entire businesses or major operating organizations. We look for people who are naturally change-oriented, intellectually curious and energized by difficult problems. Just as importantly, they must share our values and our belief that expertise carries an obligation to use it well.
One generation built farms, homes, plumbing businesses, gas stations and stores.
Another father sat in corporate lobbies asking someone to invest in the potential of two seven-year-old girls. Those investments in possibility eventually produced executives, consultants and entrepreneurs who had the opportunity to work inside some of the world’s most sophisticated commercial and government organizations. Now we have the opportunity to make that investment in others—not simply with capital, but with knowledge.
We believe experience has its greatest value when it can be transferred.
That is why we built BrainDance Collective: to take decades of hard-earned experience, codify it into repeatable playbooks, combine it with emerging technology, and put it in the hands of business and government leaders facing their own defining moments. Our journeys began in very different places. But they taught us the same lesson:
Over the decades that followed, Tracy and Ivona worked across strategy, finance, technology, operations, transformation, business development and government. They advised major corporations and public-sector organizations, worked with multibillion-dollar enterprises, and both ultimately became entrepreneurs themselves.
That last experience shaped how they approach consulting today.
There is a difference between recommending change and being responsible for making payroll. Between presenting a growth strategy and having to create the growth. Between analyzing an investment and putting your own capital and reputation at risk.
In government, the ultimate return is different, but the leadership challenge is remarkably similar.
Whether protecting critical infrastructure, modernizing technology, improving public services or accomplishing more with constrained resources, leaders must understand the problem, deploy resources intelligently and turn strategy into measurable outcomes.
Tracy and Ivona realized that decades of solving these problems had produced something more valuable than experience.
It had produced
frameworks for diagnosing organizations, improving operating models, accelerating revenue, building enterprise value, evaluating investments and applying data, analytics, automation and artificial intelligence to make better decisions and execute faster.
That became the foundation of BrainDance Collective.
frameworks for diagnosing organizations, improving operating models, accelerating revenue, building enterprise value, evaluating investments and applying data, analytics, automation and artificial intelligence to make better decisions and execute faster.
That became the foundation of BrainDance Collective.
For entrepreneurs, that can mean scaling a company, building enterprise value, preparing for investment or ultimately monetizing a lifetime of work.
For corporate leaders and investors, it can mean finding operational alpha hidden inside organizations and translating strategy into measurable financial performance.
For government executives, it means bringing the same rigor to a different bottom line: mission outcomes modernizing operations, improving decision-making, deploying technology responsibly and helping public institutions accomplish more for the people they serve.
BrainDance is intentionally built around experienced leaders who have been accountable for outcomes—not simply observers of them. Our team members bring at least one defining dimension of hands-on leadership: they have owned businesses, spent significant portions of their careers as independent advisors with measurable results, or held responsibility for leading entire businesses or major operating organizations.
We look for people who are naturally change-oriented, intellectually curious and energized by difficult problems. Just as importantly, they must share our values and our belief that expertise carries an obligation to use it well.
And we believe the experiences that make someone exceptional rarely come from a résumé alone.
We honor the whole person behind the professional. The discipline built through family, entrepreneurship, competition, service, physical well-being, setbacks, relationships and life outside the office can shape judgment just as profoundly as a title or credential. We value leaders who have developed across those dimensions and bring that perspective, maturity and humanity to the work.
That isn’t separate from performance. We believe it is often what makes sustained, high-level performance possible.
One generation built farms, homes, plumbing businesses, gas stations and stores.
Another father sat in corporate lobbies asking someone to invest in the potential of two seven-year-old girls.
Those investments in possibility eventually produced executives, consultants and entrepreneurs who had the opportunity to work inside some of the world’s most sophisticated commercial and government organizations.
Now we have the opportunity to make that investment in others—not simply with capital, but with knowledge.
That is why we built BrainDance Collective: to take decades of hard-earned experience, codify it into repeatable playbooks, combine it with emerging technology, and put it in the hands of business and government leaders facing their own defining moments.
Our journeys began in very different places. But they taught us the same lesson:
Technology & AI assessments, infrastructure optimization, workflow automation, systems governance, AI testing and prototyping lab.
MBA Florida A&M University, BBA Florida A&M University, MIT AI Strategy Certificate, Wharton M&A Certificate, Certified Treasury Professional (expired), Series 7 Licensee (expired), US ARMY Military Police Leadership
A disciplined program management leader, Tracy L. Williams has spent his career turning strategic plans into structured, milestone-driven execution across finance, operations, and growth initiatives. He is a veteran operating executive, board director, and turnaround leader with over 30 years of experience spanning private equity, corporate strategy, commercial banking, and executive finance. As Senior Operating Partner and Portfolio Company Executive Chairman at Sovereign’s Capital Management, he guided a lower middle market investment fund’s portfolio companies through growth and operational transformation. His career spans chief strategy officer, CFO, CEO, and board leadership roles across telecommunications, banking, mortgage finance, enterprise software, and restaurant operations, including leading a public safety telecom integrator’s growth strategy, co-founding a private equity advisory practice, and guiding companies through Chapter 11 reorganization, SEC-compliant capital raises, and multi-hundred-million-dollar portfolio growth. Over his career, Tracy has coordinated more than $2 billion in enterprise value and generated returns exceeding 40% IRR across more than 20 direct investments.
MBA Emory University, BA University of Mississippi, MIT Al Strategy Certificate, Amazon Web Servrices Cloud Practitioner, IC Agile Certified Professional, Project Management Professional (PM Institute)
Ivona Grimberg is a senior program executive with over 20 years of experience leading large-scale technology modernization, analytics, and risk management initiatives for the federal government and Fortune 500 companies. As Senior Program Leader at Booz Allen Hamilton, she has directed multiple cross-functional teams of more than 50 professionals on an operational transformation programs for government agencies, including cloud migration and robotic process automation, and led a 15-person analytics team that developed risk models addressing a $28 billion tax gap, delivering strategies that achieved $500 million in savings. Ivona has advised senior federal executives on identity verification for more than 100 million users, designed omnichannel service strategy for a call center serving 80 million customers, and strengthened data stewardship guidelines protecting more than 200 external data holders. Earlier in her career, she founded a boutique advisory practice serving Fortune 500 clients and delivered international tax strategy at Ernst & Young. A former competitive professional and collegiate athlete, Ivona was a Division I full scholarship recipient for women’s tennis, bringing the same discipline, focus, and drive to her career in program leadership.
MPP Harvard, University of Chicago, BA
Sheetal Maithel is a strategy and operations executive with over 15 years of experience building trust-driven strategy for organizations ranging from Google to the U.S. federal government. As Head of Strategic Insights for Consumer Trust at Google, she led the company-wide effort to define Search’s trust values, built more than 10 measurement frameworks adopted across Search, Maps, and Assistant, and ran the annual strategy process advising senior leadership on investment and policy decisions. Earlier, at Booz Allen Hamilton and Deloitte Consulting, Sheetal led more than 20 strategic planning and operations engagements for federal, state, and local government clients, including a five-year strategic vision for the New York MTA serving 1.5 billion annual riders, a fraud detection strategy for the Affordable Care Act marketplace, and an analytics initiative that improved outcomes across 50 million IRS customer sessions. Her work has contributed to more than $150 million in new consulting engagements across agencies from the SEC to state health and human services departments.
MBA Florida A&M University, BBA Florida A&M University, Harvard Venture in Management Program, Six Sigma Green Belt, Azure Cloud Coach, Series 7 Licensee (expired)
Howard Bush is an enterprise executive with over 35 years of experience driving customer success and enterprise transformation at Fortune 100 scale across big tech, big four consulting, big banking, and fintech. As Client Partner at Pearson, he sold $70 million in AI-enabled workforce learning solutions within six months of joining, 18 times his quota, and was selected to help redesign the company’s enterprise-wide sales and incentive strategy. At Accenture, Howard owned a $60 million Bank of America relationship with 40% growth in contract value, led a 900-plus person global delivery organization across three continents, and served as executive sponsor of the bank’s generative AI build function, while also growing an Amazon Pay account from scratch to $12 million in revenue. He led the retail banking conversion workstream for the largest U.S. bank merger in over a decade, safely migrating $350 billion in deposits across 12 states, and earlier built a Fortune 100 customer success practice at Microsoft and led enterprise data operations supporting the Bank of America and Merrill Lynch merger.
BA Georgia Tech, Microsoft Certification, Series 82
Dave Bernard is a technologist, entrepreneur, and inventor with over 40 years of experience founding and scaling technology companies and rescuing complex, high-stakes projects for enterprises and government agencies. As Co-Founder and CEO of The Intellection Group, he has spent more than two decades building custom SaaS, mobile, and ERP solutions for market-leading organizations, earning a reputation as the “vendor of last resort” for stalled or derailed technology initiatives. His firm has delivered a portfolio management platform for a world-leading private equity firm, a complex human resources system for a European defense ministry, and a sales force productivity system used by Microsoft, Symantec, and Computer Associates. Dave also co-founded ConCap Global, providing business consulting and mentoring services, and founded BeneVets, a technology platform that improves the accuracy and speed of veterans’ disability claims. He holds multiple patents in natural language processing and voice recognition technology, and has advised or served on the board of more than a dozen technology ventures spanning cybersecurity, traffic management, and fintech. Earlier in his career, Dave built and led enterprise data infrastructure supporting over 250 million records across hundreds of tables for a national professional services firm. He was named to Georgia’s Top 40 Most Innovative Companies and received the 2015 Virginia Governor’s Technology Award.
University of Georgia, MBA, Princeton University, BA
Takim Williams is a strategy, operations, and project management professional with five years of management consulting experience across travel, retail, technology, and the public sector, working directly with VP and C-suite stakeholders on data-driven strategy. At The Boston Consulting Group, he built the financial model behind a luxury cruise line’s new ship order decision, projecting $50 million in incremental EBITDA, and defined a new “air accessibility” metric that combined global flight data with client history to identify roughly $2 million in annual deployment savings. Takim also led a 5G use case prioritization study for the Department of Defense, quantifying $49 billion in projected cost savings and lives saved over ten years, and managed the PMO onboarding of more than 50 new roles during an omnichannel marketing rollout for a national home improvement retailer. Earlier, at Experient Group, he sized a pet CBD market opportunity targeting $175 million in incremental revenue and identified a $50 billion addressable market at the intersection of moving and life events for a major retailer. Takim holds an MBA from the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, where he was a full-tuition Batten Innovation Scholar, and a BA in Philosophy from Princeton University. He is also a published author of literary and speculative fiction.
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