Steve Delp (MBA 2023) signs his work emails with a thought-provoking phrase, “I will not fail those with whom I serve.”
It’s a line from The Special Forces Creed, which expresses the values and duties of those who serve in the U.S. Army Special Forces, also known as Green Berets.
For Delp, vice president of sales at Denver-based Kaseware, a provider of investigative case management software, the phrase holds deep personal meaning. It’s from his military service, which he says gave him discipline, taught him to lead and nurtured his interest in technology.
Rounding out his experience and giving his career more focus is his Daniels degree, which Delp believes is helping him achieve his full professional potential. His Online MBA filled in what he calls his “don’t know what I don’t know” gaps, gave him a broader perspective and business acumen, and provided both the hard and soft skills he is using to help Kaseware grow.
“I realized early on that Kaseware was going to be big, and I was going to be a core part of it,” Delp said. “If we’re going to become a billion-dollar company and I want to keep rising, I needed more experience in how big businesses operate.
“My prior experience was in startups, where you wear many different hats,” he continued. “But looking over the horizon, I realized that I didn’t know as much as I should about how big businesses work, or even how to become a big business. How do you scale an organization efficiently and profitably? And if it’s going to be me who does that, I need to be the guy the company believes can do it. That meant education, so I wasn’t just writing blank checks and trying to figure it out through trial-and-error.”
Early career exposure
As a youngster, Delp had an insatiable curiosity, exceeded only by his desire to have fun. It’s the latter quality that landed him at Valley Forge Military Academy in Pennsylvania for high school. While instilling much-needed discipline and purpose, it also launched his career.
“Valley Forge set my career in motion,” said Delp. “I was exposed to the military environment. I got up to reveille at 5:15 every morning, I marched to lunch, I did thousands of pushups. That set in motion my career path where I joined the Army right out of high school because I wasn’t ready for a less-structured college experience.”
Delp served as a non-commissioned officer in the Army and Army National Guard for eight years during which he earned his BA in history and philosophy at University of Colorado Boulder. Serving with the Colorado National Guard, he was assigned to a chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear (CBRN) response task force, which helped him understand the role of technology in addressing public safety and the threats emerging post-9/11.
“I developed a cost model for the equipment we used in those responses,” Delp said. “I quantified the savings we could derive by purchasing rather than renting certain equipment we used. It was all intuitive—not even my real job.
“My dad then strongly suggested I that leave Army and find a startup where someone would pay me to think and act like that,” he added.
Into the private sector and Kaseware
Delp parlayed his CBRN experience into a series of customer service and sales roles with Incident Response Technologies, a provider of incident response management software and services near Denver.
After several years at IRT, Delp joined Kaseware in 2019 in an account executive role, then became director of sales. He was promoted to VP of sales upon completion of his MBA studies in October 2023. Now, Delp leads global sales of Kaseware’s SaaS-based application software to law enforcement, corporate security and government agencies worldwide.
He credits his promotion to his continuing curiosity and diligence, and directly to his MBA.
“It was hard work, but the ROI from my Daniels MBA is enormous,” Delp said. “I was covering both our international government and corporate security verticals and working with customers around the globe. My studies had immediate relevance. I was able to see my work, the work of my colleagues, our processes, our contracts—every facet of our business—with so much more meaning. I had a new perspective about how these functions worked together, which was a force multiplier.”
Delp is in the right place. Kaseware was founded by former FBI special agents and he’s working with many colleagues who, like him, are “prior something”—former military, intelligence, federal agents or local police.
As former somethings, Delp and his colleagues get to “stay in the fight” despite not serving in an official government capacity. That and his MBA, he says, make it all worthwhile.