From Dugout to Desktop: A Conversation with Adam Berry

There’s a version of Adam Berry’s life where he spent his twenties in a minor league dugout somewhere in the Southeast, chasing a career in professional baseball.

There’s another version of his story where he stays in retail management, keeps climbing toward running his own territory, and trades work-life balance for the demands that come with that kind of ambition.

But neither of those happened.

Instead, Adam Berry is a software architect at Rōnin Consulting, where he’s been since 2019 and where, if he has anything to say about it, he’ll stay. He found his way here through a canceled basketball game, a wine night, and a two-hour conversation with a stranger.

This is that story.

Indiana roots, Tennessee dreams

Adam grew up in rural Indiana, the kind of place where farming isn’t a lifestyle choice; it was the family business. His dad, his uncle, and his grandfather before them ran a Massey Ferguson agricultural implement dealership.

“It was a big farming community,” he says. “We had a family farm, and we still do.”

Taking over the family business wasn’t part of Adam’s path; his was to leave Indiana to play college baseball. He earned a scholarship to King College in Bristol, Tennessee, and came south to play. What he didn’t know yet was that the sport that brought him to Tennessee would eventually lead him somewhere else entirely.

It began during his freshman year, when he was living in a dorm with no cable. But it had something better: a T1 line. At the time, most people at home were still using slow dial-up. A T1 connection was roughly 25 times faster, and in the late ’90s to early 2000s, universities were among the only places that had them.

Having grown up on dial-up, this was a different world entirely.

“We had a fast pipe, which opened up so many possibilities,” Recalls Adam. “I taught myself how to build simple web pages first, then just kept iterating and learning more advanced techniques for the time.”

By the end of his freshman year, Adam was running the college athletics website as a work-study job. A mentor on the tech side of things had taken him under his wing and helped him develop what was, at that point, still just a hobby. But it was a hobby that had legs.

A major built for one

Adam’s undergraduate degree technically lives in the business college, and he has a piece of paper that says “online media and marketing.” What it doesn’t say is that Adam was the first online media and marketing major at his school because the university created the major specifically for him.

“They created that major for me based on my interest, essentially,” he says. “The guy that was mentoring me was like, we’ve been trying to spin this up. You’re the perfect candidate.”

He did all of this while playing college baseball on scholarship, until an injury led to surgery. At the end of his senior year, his body was sending a clear message: it was time to move on.

“It was hard, but it was the right decision. I had another year of eligibility left after redshirting my sophomore year following arm surgery, but there were no graduate degree options available there at the time.  Baseball is a humbling sport. We all get told at some point we’re done. I was fortunate to play as long as I did, and fortunate to have had people in my life who helped me prepare for that eventuality.”

The hobby he picked up during his freshman year, building websites, ultimately made the transition into a computer science degree possible.

“I walked into a master’s in computer science program with no formal undergrad foundation outside of one C++ course, ” he says. “I went from practicing baseball four to six hours a day to sixteen hours a day at a computer, just trying to absorb as much information as possible. It was definitely like drinking through a firehose at times.”

He came out the other side with a master’s degree and a desire to put it into practice.

Living that consulting life

Three years in and looking for that next growth opportunity, Adam moved into consulting.

“I had a colleague who was a consultant that I worked closely with. Over the course of a year, we had talked through the logic, pros/cons, and necessary preparation to make the move.”

When a recruiter called, it was his wife, Hollie, who encouraged him to take the leap.

“I was prepared,” he says. “I had a very specific list of what I was looking for. She said, ‘I can do that.’ I said, OK, let’s go.”

That was the beginning of roughly 14 years of consulting, bouncing between engagements at insurance, sports marketing, healthcare, education, and fintech companies. He was good at the work, and many of his roles turned into “we’d like you to stay.”

“There is no bigger compliment to my work than being asked to stay or be extended past the original terms. I’ve been fortunate to have one or both in all of my engagements.”

The wine Wednesday that changed everything

Adam’s wife, Hollie, had been teaching alongside a colleague, Allison, for a couple of years, but their husbands had never met.

One evening, the teachers got together for a wine night. Adam had a rec league basketball game, until it got canceled, and Hollie told him to come out. He drove over, met Chuck Harris, one of the owners of Rōnin Consulting, and they talked for a few hours.

Adam had just rolled off a contract, and Chuck was building a team. By the end of the night, Chuck said exactly the kind of thing Chuck would say: I think we can help each other here.

Within days, Adam had met with the other owners, Byron and Ryan, and he soon came in as a consultant in August 2019, somewhere around employee 11 or 12.

“It was truly like everybody was one ship steering in the same direction,” he says of those early days. “I’d run through a brick wall for Byron. There was so much to desire when it was that small. Top down, just good people.”

Six years and counting

Adam is currently on an engagement with a fintech client, working across data and analytics. In six years at Rōnin, he’s worked across multiple clients and found what he spent his whole consulting career looking for: a home base.

He’s honest about what the consulting life is: the peaks, the valleys, the projects that are green-field and exciting, and the ones that are maintenance work and just as necessary. “Happy is a fluctuating state of mind for me,” he says. “Am I happy all the time? No. But I’ve done this for 20 years. There are peaks and valleys.”

What keeps him at Rōnin? “I am thankful and grateful to be surrounded by some really good humans. We consistently deliver at the highest level for our clients. That is a standard I am extremely proud to be a part of.”

If Rōnin ended tomorrow, he says, it would crush him. For a guy who spent 14 years in consulting, accepting that every gig eventually ends, that’s not a small thing to admit.

“I’ve never had the thought that this job is my last. It was always: the consulting gig isn’t going to last forever. But I can honestly say I would love for my work at Rōnin to be my last job.”