The phone stopped ringing for months. Mike Clesceri was in the middle of repositioning himself, no longer the guy who builds websites, not yet the process and value consultant he was trying to become, and the gap between the two identities turned out to be longer and quieter than he had planned for. He burned through a significant portion of his savings to bridge it. He took any minor project he could find. He sent cold pitches. He audited his own processes. That stretch is the one that eventually became Alpine Agile.
Clesceri lives in Eagle, just outside Boise, after a route that started in Simi Valley, California, ran through Coeur d'Alene during high school, dropped down to Phoenix and Prescott, and finally brought him back to Idaho thirty years later. As the founder of Alpine Agile, he balances launching the consultancy's dedicated client roster with his structured role as a senior document control coordinator at WGN Star—a position that keeps his operational execution razor-sharp.
The way he describes the work now is plain: he helps businesses automate workflows so they stop wasting money. Operating on a predictable, flat monthly retainer model, Alpine Agile provides a full year of dedicated consulting and strategic execution. The system he has built around delivery is highly repeatable, creating a continuous feedback loop that allows clients to seamlessly adapt when business goals shift or new tools need to be integrated.
It taught me how to navigate project changes smoothly and pushed me to focus on the bigger picture: optimizing business processes and making sure everything we build delivers real business value.
Thirty-three years of experience sits behind that simple description. He started as a developer building sites in Joomla, moved to WordPress, then React. As the work grew, he started outsourcing development and slid into project management. In his early project manager years, he ran everything Waterfall, and he ran it rigid. Scope changes were the enemy. Clients felt trapped. Developers got frustrated. He will tell you straight that his style was the problem.
The wake-up call was a major website build that ground to a halt. The client kept asking for changes as the project took shape. Clesceri held the original scope. Communication broke down on both sides. He had to swallow his pride, get on an uncomfortable call, and find a compromise to ship a functioning product and save the relationship. It cost thousands of dollars in wasted hours and a real hit to his reputation at the time. It also forced him to throw out Waterfall and adopt Agile, which he now describes as the shift that changed everything about how he works.
What Agile gave him was not a new set of ceremonies. It was a different posture toward people. The Agile Manifesto's core principles, human collaboration over rigid documentation, responding to change over contract negotiation, are the lens he runs every engagement through now. He went from managing tasks to solving business problems. That is the frame Alpine Agile is built on.
Tools and frameworks don't solve problems, people do.
The faith and purpose dimension of the work, for Clesceri, is not abstract. It shows up in how he treats people when things go wrong. Having been the rigid manager who frustrated his own team, he now runs collaborative environments on purpose. That means listening before reacting, leaving ego at the door, and treating developers and clients as partners rather than resources to be managed. The lesson under all of it, after more than three decades, is that tools and frameworks do not solve problems. People do. If the culture around a project lacks transparent communication and empathy for the team doing the heavy lifting, the project fails. Every time.
While outsiders assume the industry is a model of high-tech efficiency, the reality behind the curtain is far less glamorous. The day-to-day ecosystem is still quietly propped up by fragmented Excel sheets and manual phone calls. Alpine Agile steps into that exact friction point, replacing operational chaos with repeatable, automated systems.
The constraint right now is the one every new consultancy has. Clesceri is chasing clients. He is balancing two roles, the WGN Star work that pays the bills and the Alpine Agile build that takes the evenings and the meetings in between. He is in the process of securing the first core clients for the consultancy. After thirty-three years, he says there is nothing more rewarding than taking the hard lessons about efficiency and using them to help businesses stop wasting money.