LIU013: The Engineer Who Built a Business to Fund a Mission
Ray, founder of Libertas Consulting MSP and the nonprofit TKW (Technology Knowledge Worldwide), shares his journey from running bulletin board services at age 12 to building a consulting business and a charity that has donated over a million dollars in network infrastructure to communities in need. He discusses how early problem-solving instincts, key relationships, and a drive to give back shaped both ventures. His nonprofit's most ambitious project yet is a full infrastructure overhaul for the Philadelphia Ronald McDonald House.
Summary
Ray's career in IT began at age 12, helping his father run a bulletin board service before the internet was mainstream. His early exposure to computers led him to tech school and an MCSE certification, which he describes as a career golden ticket in the early 2000s. A pivotal high school computer teacher who challenged students to beat him at Solitaire became a formative mentor after Ray hacked the Windows Solitaire program to cheat — an early demonstration of the problem-solving instincts that would define his career.
His professional life began in earnest during college, working overnight security at a senior living property in Philadelphia. After catching the attention of the regional IT director, Ray was brought into IT work across multiple properties. His breakthrough moment came when he identified and circumvented a Y2K-related software bug designed to force paid upgrades — a fix the company deployed across all their properties and which led to a full-time job offer in New York City at age 21.
Ray spent years building infrastructure at scale for a large senior living company spanning 30 properties across the Northeast. After that company was acquired, he transitioned into consulting, initially as a side hustle sparked by a chance encounter on a train with a marketing consultant who became his first client. He cycled in and out of full-time corporate roles, always returning to consulting driven by his love of variety and problem-solving. He named his company Libertas — Latin for liberty — partly inspired by the emotional aftermath of witnessing the September 11 attacks in New York City.
His MSP, Libertas Consulting, now operates with one full-time employee and a network of trusted subcontractors. Ray describes his core consulting value as identifying overspend — in one case finding over a million dollars in wasted expenditure within the first six months of acting as a company's CIO. He also candidly admits to the 'we' tactic — always speaking as though representing a larger team — as a deliberate strategy to project scale.
In parallel, Ray co-founded TKW (Technology Knowledge Worldwide), a nonprofit now in its fifth year that has donated nearly or over a million dollars in technology infrastructure to underserved communities. The organization runs an annual volunteer event called TextGiving, which falls between Canadian and American Thanksgiving, where IT professionals donate their skills and time to outfit nonprofits and community organizations with full network, wireless, access control, AV, and security camera systems. Past projects include a community church-preschool in suburban Philadelphia, a youth fitness gym in urban Baltimore, a preschool in North Carolina, and four properties of a domestic violence and anti-sex trafficking organization in Rhode Island — all completed in a single weekend.
The 2025 TextGiving project targets the Philadelphia chapter of Ronald McDonald House, described as the busiest hotel in Philadelphia, with an estimated $300,000 in hardware needs including access control for nearly 200 doors, new wireless infrastructure, networking, and security cameras. Ray is actively seeking vendor sponsors, equipment donations, and volunteer labor. Donations can be made at donate.texgiving.org and volunteers or sponsors can sign up at texgiving.org.
Throughout the conversation, Ray reflects on the mindset shifts required to go out on your own, emphasizing that early in his career he prioritized salary over life value, a choice he now regrets. He argues that the money follows passion and skill, and that the most important resource is time. He also credits TKW with building a trusted professional network — people he now passes work to and receives work from — demonstrating that the nonprofit functions as both a charitable mission and a high-trust professional community.
Key Insights
- Ray argues that his entire career was propelled by solving problems he technically shouldn't have been solving — hacking Solitaire to get a grade and remming out a Y2K countdown clock in DOS — suggesting that lateral, rule-bending thinking is a more reliable career accelerator than formal compliance.
- Ray claims that the Y2K software bug he circumvented was intentionally designed by the software vendor to force paid upgrades, and that his ability to bypass it in DOS code led directly to a full-time job offer in New York City at age 21.
- Ray deliberately uses 'we' instead of 'I' when speaking about his MSP, even as a mostly solo operation, as a calculated tactic to make the business appear larger to prospective clients — a strategy he says worked consistently throughout his career.
- Ray contends that one of the most tangible services his MSP provides is identifying technology overspend, citing a real example where he found over a million dollars in wasted expenditure within six months of acting as a company's CIO.
- Ray describes TKW's TextGiving events as producing a secondary benefit beyond charity: a vetted, high-trust professional network where members have seen each other's work firsthand, leading to real referral relationships and subcontracting arrangements across the country.
- Ray argues that asking vendors to donate equipment for a nonprofit project is not an unreasonable ask — framing it as a marketing opportunity for them — and credits this framing with securing consistent vendor participation including Alta Labs, Eaton, and Vertical Cable.
- Ray states that the biggest mindset barrier he had to overcome in running TKW was the belief that something is impossible simply because it has never been done before, and that the committee's approach is to push through that assumption by simply executing.
- Ray reflects that he spent much of his career making other people wealthy by devoting his skills to building their companies, and that he wishes he had committed to independent consulting two decades earlier rather than being repeatedly lured back by large salaries.
- Ray claims that the money will find you if you're good at and love what you do, arguing that financial concern is the most prominent worry at the start of independence but ultimately the least important factor for those who persist.
- Ray describes TKW's Slack community as the organizational backbone of the nonprofit — a free, always-on environment where members get technical questions answered, which then serves as a pipeline for recruiting volunteers to in-person TextGiving events.
- Ray notes that TKW intentionally includes AV, structured cabling, access control, and security trades — not just networking — so that volunteers from all IT disciplines can participate and contribute meaningfully at installations.
- Ray argues that working across many different customer environments as an MSP engineer or SE provides faster and broader technology exposure than owning a single network for years, which he sees as a significant advantage especially for early-to-mid career engineers building their skills portfolio.
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