Contact

Three Ways to Reach Out

A call, an email, or the places the work already shows up.

Schedule a discovery call

The fastest path. Fifteen minutes if you have a specific question, thirty if you want to work through the problem. Bring the problem and we will start there. Whether it is a training gap, a workforce question, or a research challenge, the discovery call is where we figure out if there is a fit and what the right shape of engagement looks like.

Book 30 minutes Book 15 minutes

Send an email

For longer messages, attachments, or anything that needs more context than a calendar event handles.

carl@waywardleaders.com

Response within one business day.

Find us elsewhere

Carl Lee Tolbert opening the high voltage door into a drive training lab, drawings in hand, with a class working on ABB drives beyond.
Teaching where the equipment is. The class runs on live drives, not slides.

Helpful links to friends

  • safeHAND Systems provides electrical safety training and compliance consulting, helping commercial and industrial facilities align their programs with NFPA 70E standards.
  • MotorDoc LLC is a veteran-owned firm specializing in electric motor diagnostics, electrical signature analysis, and continuous condition monitoring for industrial and commercial motor systems.
  • Alpha Robotics delivers hands-on FANUC and Yaskawa Motoman robotics training for everyone from equipment operators to engineers, at their facility or yours.

Wayward Leaders® is a veteran-owned VFD training practice. We teach maintenance teams and plant electricians to install, commission, and troubleshoot variable frequency drives correctly, in person, at the plant that owns the equipment, anywhere in the United States.

Every class ends with a scored competency assessment. The plant gets a way to prove what each technician can do, not a roster of who sat in the room.

The instruction is field-trained. It is drawn from nearly 8,000 VFD, power, and motor documents and from more than 750 commissioned drives captured through personal field experience and data collection. Carl Lee Tolbert, PhD, CMRP, and ATD Master Trainer® candidate, leads it. He has delivered more than 5,000 hours of VFD instruction across 30 years and trained 8,000 industrial professionals, from International Paper to the U.S. Navy.

The premise is simple: VFDs do not fail. Installations fail them. The curriculum is built backward from that.

Installation, commissioning, troubleshooting, and fault diagnosis guides are published openly at waywardleaders.com.