Bethany J. Curran

The story

I didn't set out to be a modernization leader. I set out to solve the problem in front of me — and kept doing it until I'd done it enough times that someone finally had a name for it.

Three times in my career, I've walked into an organization with an ill-defined problem, sat in the work long enough to understand it, and written a job description that didn't exist before I got there. That's not a tactic. It's just what happens when you pay closer attention to what's broken than to what your title says.

Most recently, I spent two and a half years modernizing an entire portfolio of technology services at a large MSP. I built a framework to fully map and address technical debt — then applied it to a $300K monthly recurring revenue service, producing a 35% profit increase in nine months. Then I applied the same methodology to the smaller services. Then the largest.

My measure of success was the day my teams stopped needing me. I took a week off for my birthday, didn't check my phone once, and came back to silence. The sky didn't fall. That was the signal. My assignment was complete.

My approach to modernization isn't primarily technical. It's organizational. Legacy systems become legacy because of how humans made decisions over time — the shortcuts, the incentives, the things no one wrote down. You can't fix the system without understanding the humans inside it. And you can't lead the humans through change without earning their trust first.

I'm currently exploring what that next problem looks like — and whose organization I'll help modernize next. If yours has a problem that doesn't have a job title yet, I'd like to hear about it.