By Michael Rutherford · For Executives and Counselors
This is your guided read. No pitch deck, no rush. What RezConnect is, how the school pathway works, where Walk the Beat fits, the clubs and nonprofits that carry this town, and the economics that tie students, businesses, and education together — all in one place, in the open, so you can get caught up at your own pace.
“Many times people fail because they are not coached. Technology doesn't fail businesses — the lack of coaching does.”
The conviction underneath everything below
RezConnect HQ is where a local business runs its customer communications in one place — calls, texts, email, reviews, follow-up — instead of losing them across five apps and a missed-call list. The people who bring it to businesses and coach them on it are called Growth Partners. The technology is the RezConnect platform. The coaching is what makes it stick.
Start here · Free
The front door. A free look at how a business shows up — or doesn't — when customers search, call, and check reviews. It shows the gaps plainly before anyone talks about buying anything.
Enter at RezConnect.store →The working home
One home for the conversations a business lives on: the phone agent, messaging, follow-up, and the record of it all. Built so nothing a customer says falls through the cracks.
“We count everything, finish everything, then coach the rest!”
See RezConnect HQ →Assessment first
Know what shapes the price, before you choose a plan. Pricing starts with an assessment of the real scope — build-out services are professional services, quoted for the work actually needed, not a one-size package.
Read the Pricing Guide →The model doesn't start with a job. It starts with habits — showing up, serving, leading — and it ends with a young person who has served a real customer, earned real money, and carries portable skills into whatever comes next. Each stage hands the student to the next.
Stage 1
Service habits formed early — helping, showing up, being counted on in your own school and town.
Ages 11–14Stage 2
High school leadership in action — running projects, leading peers, learning responsibility with real stakes.
High schoolStage 3
The first real customer. A student brings a local business onto the platform and serves them month to month — with a coach beside them.
First real customerStage 4
Skills made official and portable — proof a student can carry to an employer, a college, or their own business.
Stage 5
Real income for real work, and skills that travel — communication, follow-through, and customer care, learned by doing.
Earn & carry it forwardThe missing seat
The seat this model adds inside a school is an instructor / facilitator who coaches — the adult who walks with students as they serve real businesses, reviews the work, and teaches the follow-through. Technology alone was never the plan; the coaching is the plan.
Higher education
Robin Spring of Grand Valley State University is the pathway's higher-education champion — the bridge between the school pipeline and what comes after graduation.
See the school ecosystem →The pipeline doesn't run through one building, either. Three more paths belong inside this education story — the career center most of our districts' students pass through, the community college where the portfolio keeps working, and one school worked end to end, as the example every other school follows:
The career-center door
The Ottawa Area Intermediate School District runs the Careerline Tech Center in Holland — 30 state-approved career and technical programs for students from the district's eleven member districts, Grand Haven and Spring Lake among them, on a model that already runs on local business partnerships. This is the room where the merchant network and the high school pipeline shake hands. The leadership is the conversation: Jason Pasatta, who leads the district's teaching and learning services, and Dave Searles, Associate Superintendent for Career and Technical Education, under Superintendent Dr. Kyle Mayer. That conversation is opening now — a portfolio is prepared for that leadership, and the first handshake is the Careerline Fall Open House.
Open the OAISD portfolio →The community-college path
The pipeline's other college door is a working-learner college. Muskegon Community College's community programs already work with e-portfolios, and its LEAP program grants college credit for documented prior learning — up to 30 credits. So the portfolio a student builds here doesn't start over at college: it gets assessed, and the evidence travels with them. No partnership is claimed — LEAP is a public program, open to any enrolled student — and the first conversation there is work in front of us.
The worked example
When anyone asks what this looks like inside a real school district, this is the page we open. Spring Lake is the template school: its portfolio carries the whole pathway in the school's own colors — the mechanics, the numbers in the open, the ladders, and the steps to begin — because a portfolio is meant to be studied and implemented from, not just read. Every other high school's edition follows this same pattern; only the school's name, colors, and cover note change — Grand Haven included.
Open the Spring Lake portfolio →This is the split, exactly as it runs. A local business pays for coached communications help. The student who serves them earns the largest working share. A nonprofit the student names benefits every month. And the platform share keeps the system running — or, in a school deployment, funds the school's own foundation.
$97 / month
$997 / year
When a nonprofit steps in
When a nonprofit itself steps into the pathway as the participant, the student share and the nonprofit share come together: $47 of every $97 works directly for that organization — earned through service, not asked for as a donation.
In a school deployment
In a school deployment, the $50 platform share can flow to the school's education foundation instead — so the same dollar that runs the system also funds the school that hosts the pathway.
Walk the Beat is the community music movement where the pipeline meets the town. Local venues, live music, and a simple purpose: instruments and opportunity for kids in Grand Haven.
Founder
Walk the Beat was created and developed by Dave Palmer. Now retired, he gave his blessing for the team to carry it forward — and the credit for creating it stays with him, always.
Leadership today
Its president today is Becky Newman, who leads the mission and its fundraising. The movement is anchored to The Spread The Music Foundation Inc., a 501(c)(3) in Grand Haven.
Where students fit
Students in the pathway help carry Walk the Beat's outreach and venue work — real events, real audiences, real follow-through. It's work-based learning with a backbeat.
Visit Walk the Beat →The same members, the same volunteers, the same causes, carried hall by hall. This is the part of the build that lives in the clubs' world — what has already been created for the Eagles, how the four fraternal clubs can stand together, and how nonprofits raise funds through the pathway instead of only asking.
Your Aerie
The portfolio built for your own hall: a member directory that creates activity instead of just displaying it, messaging, bookings, and real tools for the Women's Auxiliary — every piece built by students in the pathway, as paid, coached work.
Open the Eagles #925 portfolio →The four halls
The fraternal clubs portfolio — Eagles #925, VFW Post 2326, American Legion Post #28, and Elks Lodge #1200 sharing one calendar, one directory standard, and each other's causes in turn. Every club keeps its own hall, name, rituals, causes, and money.
Open the Fraternal Clubs portfolio →The working proof
Already real: 51 member businesses listed at the Aerie today, maintained by Anita Yoder — reimagined as a searchable, tappable directory a member can use at the moment they need a roofer, a lawyer, or a DJ. The standard proposed for all four halls.
See the directory →Nonprofits
The economics you read above turn toward the mission here: when a nonprofit itself steps into the pathway, $47 of every $97 works directly for that organization — earned through service, not asked for as a donation. Behind it sits From Aid to Outcomes: nonprofits reviewing the evidence before donations go out. The full pitch package is in Michael's hands — ask him for it.
The board's view
The counselor's view of the mission: where Walk the Beat stands, the year-round theme-night model, the materials the board can inspect, and the focused ask in front of it — the same working papers the board reads.
Read the Directors' Briefing →The short version. The full story — and the paper trail behind it — live behind the two doors under the timeline.
Kitchens at the Ritz-Carlton and Four Seasons in Chicago — including ice sculpture work that earned him the Tribune's name for him: “The Ice Man.” Craft, standards, and service learned at the highest level.
Architect and visionary of a team-built system, mentored by Bob Parker, with code by Alan Weiner and BJ Hart. His first proof that coaching a team beats working alone.
Years inside the point-of-sale industry, working the systems restaurants and retailers live on — where he learned exactly where businesses lose customers: the follow-up.
The e-portfolio years — helping people prove what they can do with evidence, not claims. That discipline is all over the certification stage of the pathway today.
All of it converges here: Second Chance Pathways and the RezConnect platform — coaching students, businesses, and schools in one connected system.
Each door below says what you'll find behind it. Open them in a new tab, read at your pace, and come back here — this page is your map.
The Platform
The platform's front door — start with the free A.I. Visibility Audit and see how a business shows up today.
The Platform
The working home for a business's communications — phone, messaging, and follow-up in one place, phone-friendly.
The Platform
Assessment first: what shapes the price before you choose a plan — including the $97 split, in the open.
Education
The full pipeline — Builders Club to certification to real income — laid out for school leadership.
Education
How the pieces fit inside a school — the instructor's seat, the foundation, and the partners around it.
Education
The career-center door — Careerline Tech Center and the district leadership where the merchant network meets the high school pipeline.
Education
The worked example: the whole pathway inside one real district, in the school's own colors — the pattern every other school's edition follows.
Community
The community music movement — events, venues, and instruments and opportunity for kids in Grand Haven.
Community
The portfolio built for the Eagles' own Aerie — directory, messaging, bookings, and the Auxiliary's tools, built by students.
Community
Eagles, VFW, American Legion Post #28, and Elks — one calendar, one directory standard, each cause carried in turn.
Community
The working proof — 51 member businesses, maintained by Anita Yoder, reimagined searchable and tappable.
Community
The board's working papers — where the mission stands and what it is being asked to approve.
The Story
Fifty years in full — Chicago hotels, T.U.R.N.S., point of sale, portfolios, and home to Grand Haven.
The Story
“Not a pitch. A paper trail.” The documented record behind the claims — receipts, not rhetoric.
The Pathway
The one signup door — where a student steps into the pathway and toward a first real customer.
Contact
Save Michael's contact in one tap — phone, email, and sites, straight to your phone.
08 — The Conversation
No form here, no clock on it. When you've had the chance to sit with this — the platform, the pipeline, the economics, Walk the Beat, the halls you belong to — I'd value a conversation about where you see yourself fitting. A door you want to open, a business you know, a student you believe in: that's the conversation. My card is below; reach me any way that suits you.
Call or text
(616) 805-9710
Michael Rutherford, direct
[email protected]
Replies come from Michael himself
Tap card
dot.cards/rezconnect
Save the contact in one tap →
“We count everything, finish everything, then coach the rest!”
— Michael Rutherford