The story
Twenty years in the seat, then a firm built to fix what the seat could not.
Brad Hobbs grew up in South Georgia in a first-generation Christian home, started following Jesus at twelve, and at thirteen wrote down three goals: be a chaplain to a college football team, get married in college, and finish a Ph.D. before thirty. All three happened. What came after is the reason this site exists.
The arc
Every stop was a turnaround or a transformation.
Orlando. Mobile. Charlotte. San Antonio. Five moves, three sectors, one pattern.
The global nonprofit, at twenty-one
Brad's first executive seat was as the number two of Student Leadership University, a global leadership development organization working with the children of enterprise leaders, rulers, and heads of state, ages sixteen to twenty-eight. He was twenty-one. For five years he carried most of the organization's revenue, negotiated the hotel and airline contracts, filled events on four continents, and spent about 180 nights a year on the road learning business the hard way from a visionary who could ideate anything.
It taught him the job he would later name for every operator he advises: making sure the vision could float.
The church plant and the Ph.D.
Brad and Lauren moved to Mobile to plant a church out of the college where they had met and married. He pastored it for roughly five years while completing a Master of Divinity and a Ph.D. in Organizational Leadership and Change Management. His doctoral research studied how thousands of organizations across churches, nonprofits, and businesses move through change under new leaders, and why the great ones collapse.
The finding still runs through everything he teaches. Organizations do not fail for lack of passion. They fail from leadership blind spots, financial mismanagement, people problems, and a strategy that did not move when the world did.
Coca-Cola Consolidated
Frank Harrison, CEO of Coca-Cola Consolidated, the largest Coca-Cola bottler in the United States, recruited Brad to Charlotte as Executive Director to rebuild and run the company's foundation. The seat had turned over repeatedly before he arrived. For three years Brad reported directly to Frank and traveled with him almost everywhere.
His first week was a finance meeting. The CEO slid a folder across the table and asked Brad to walk him through the financials. Brad got as far as the multi-year forecast on aluminum and admitted he had no idea. The CEO said he knew, handed him the CFO, a coach, and the vice chairman, and gave him thirty days. Brad calls the three years that followed a living MBA: Fortune 500 financials, foundation financials, treasury, and his first exposure to ultra-high-net-worth family offices.
The work ran in two directions. In North America, training faith-driven CEOs of middle-market companies to steward their businesses for kingdom impact. Overseas, economic development, church planting, and education in the most rural parts of North Africa, East Africa, and Southeast Asia.
One week was boardrooms. The next week was rural Sudan. Brad still says the boardroom was often the more dangerous room.
Two lessons from Frank shape how Brad leads today. Every leadership hire is a plus-one or a minus-one to your team; no one is ever flat. And a question Frank asked him one day: if I tithe ten percent, I will tithe 150 percent of my church's budget. Do you think that is healthy? Brad calls it his theological education from a business guy, and it reframed generosity for him from the tithe to stewardship of everything.
The mud hut where "moonshots" was born
Representing Coca-Cola in a refugee camp in northern Uganda, Brad sat in a mud hut with UNICEF, a world hunger organization, and the Bishop of East Africa, in a camp surviving on rice trucks three times a week, asking what would move the needle generationally. He was the strategy guy in the room. If they could name the right problem, he could back the strategy out of it.
The question he left with became his life's work: if the for-profit, the nonprofit, and the local church could ever collaborate this way, could they solve some of the world's greatest challenges? What happens when people with a heart for the flourishing of all humanity have both the capacity and the resources to redeem what is broken?
He put two words on it. Architecting moonshots.
The largest church and the hardest move
In early 2019 Brad and Lauren were living in what they thought was their forever house in Charlotte. Brad had laughed for months at a friend of ten years, Ed Newton, who had become pastor of Community Bible Church in San Antonio in 2018 and kept calling. Then, as Brad tells it, God wrecked them both. He resigned from a dream job and offered to stay three months for the transition. Frank told him: when God moves your heart, sprint to obedience; if I keep you longer than He asked, I become your stumbling block.
They sold the house and moved, Genesis 12 style, to help one of the largest multi-campus churches in the country through a founder transition to a pastor who had never led a staff before, and who suddenly had hundreds of team members, a balance sheet upside down, campuses behind on payments, and a payroll no bank would touch. Brad served as executive pastor through that transition, including COVID, and the church came out the other side.
He calls it the hardest move of his life and the most fruitful.
Novum Partners
In August 2021 Lauren told Brad he was not trusting God. A week later he told Ed his time was up. He left that September and turned his long-running consulting practice into a full-time firm. It scaled to a hundred clients in the first year. Then he watched most of them stall, and the reason was always the same: he was building incredible strategy and handing it to operations leaders still running yesterday's playbook.
So he built the capacity. He added HR, acquired a church and nonprofit bookkeeping team, recruited accountants who had left Big Four firms to do work with meaning, and built Novum Partners into a strategic management firm serving faith-driven businesses, churches, and nonprofits. Novum is Latin for unprecedented. The firm has served more than 400 organizations from San Antonio since 2021.
He did not start Novum to build a McKinsey. He started it because he believes it takes a redemptive lens, a relational approach, and the same skill level as the best firms in the world to bring shalom to work.
"What PwC, Bain, and McKinsey are to the Fortune 500 is what I had access to at Coke. So I asked: how do you take that framework horsepower and put it to the highest-capacity churches, networks, and nonprofits?" Brad Hobbs
Credentials
What the Ph.D. is for.
Brad holds the doctorate and tells young leaders not to bank on the degree. Strategic thinking comes through laps, not lectures.
Ph.D., Organizational Leadership and Change Management
Doctoral research on how organizations across sectors move through change under new leadership, and the patterns behind a century of organizational collapse.
Master of Divinity
Seminary-trained pastor, church planter, and executive pastor. Brad's frameworks are built where organizational design theory, leadership theory, and change management meet the story of Scripture.
Operator, three sectors
Three years as Executive Director of the Coca-Cola Consolidated foundation, reporting to CEO Frank Harrison. Executive leadership at a multi-campus church of thousands. Global nonprofit leadership on four continents. Advisory and financial leadership engagements across more than 400 organizations through Novum Partners.
Executive coach and board adviser
Brad coaches founders, CEOs, executive directors, and senior pastors one to one, and leads board sessions, strategic planning intensives, and succession work for the organizations Novum serves.
First things
The order he keeps.
Husband and father first. Follower of Jesus second. Strategic adviser third. CEO fourth.
Brad is married to Lauren and lives in San Antonio with their children. He is home for dinner most nights. He will tell you, with data, that leaders who do thinking work have to do things with their hands, and that no team can run at redline fifty-two weeks a year without something breaking: you, your family, or the business.
He is still, in his words, a pioneer kingdom builder at heart. Faith is the foundation of the work. It is never a sword and never a crutch.