Twenty Years.
One Insight.
My name is Roj Reed. I'm a Duke-educated economist turned enterprise strategist with over two decades leading enterprise sales, business development, operations, and transformation at Oracle, T-Mobile, NCR, First Data and management consulting firms.
I've advised C-suite leaders on digital transformation, AI strategy, cloud adoption, and growth. I've led complex, multi-million-dollar buying cycles across dozens of stakeholders, helped build sales organizations, and led large operating teams. I also won a global executive presentation championship for storytelling and executive persuasion.
Long before any of that, business was the family trade. My mother, my grandparents, and several of my uncles owned businesses, and I grew up working in ours. I saw what building something takes: the hard work, the setbacks, the tax trouble, the perseverance. I grew up around creators too, family and friends whose parents were entertainers, musicians, writers, and producers, people who bet on themselves and followed their passion. I learned early that effort alone does not protect a business. Structure does.
But the most important thing I learned didn't come from any of those titles or wins.
I watched brilliant people work themselves into exhaustion, chasing tactics before establishing clarity, investing in solutions before diagnosing root causes, staying busy while mistaking activity for progress.
And I watched a different kind of leader, one who identified the highest-impact actions, built systems instead of relying on willpower, and created compounding advantages over time.
That contrast, repeated across industries, companies, and careers, became the foundation for everything I now do. I founded Modern Leverage to help people and organizations do what the best consistently do: create leverage, amplify impact, and build what actually matters.
Three generations back, my grandfather built structures and kept homes in the hands of his people. My mother built businesses. I build organizations. So when I say why the firm exists, it comes out in one line:
Then I proved it on myself. I architected an AI agent organization for Modern Leverage with my own hands: AI agents, every one named for Black excellence. My chief of staff is named for Obama. Every piece of work passes an independent verifier named for Thurgood Marshall before it reaches me. The names carry a daily standard, and the firm is the living case study behind every client engagement: judgment stays human, throughput scales with AI.
I also speak and mentor. At Oracle, NCR and First Data, presenting was part of the job, including main-stage presentations at sales kickoffs. In 2026 I joined AI panels at the Technology Association of Georgia's inaugural //SHIFT: AI Summit and at a LEAD Academy session hosted by Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc. Mentoring started earlier, with a year of AmeriCorps service in South Metro Atlanta high schools and youth mentorship through Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity, Inc. Now I lead a peer group of business owners in the Better Business Bureau of Greater Atlanta's BRIDGE Forward cohort, and I make time for early-career professionals finding their way.
