Transform Your Leadership Journey
Empower your team with the courage and clarity of a creator.
Empower Your Leadership Journey
Transformational Leadership
Discover how to lead with courage and clarity through our unique Lead Like a Creator™ program. Forged in the fires, designed for bold operators and executives, this experience will help you unlock your potential and drive impactful change. Join the Movement
About Send Me
My Philosophy
As a Leadership Coach, I believe in guiding my clients towards discovering their own inner strength, resilience and wisdom. I believe everyone has the ability to create a fulfilling and meaningful life, and I am here to help you achieve that. Growing people is my life's work.
My Experience
I have been a practicing Leadership Coach for over 20 years, working with clients from all walks of life and helping them navigate through life and career challenges. I have a background in Engineering, Management and Leadership Building, which allows me to provide a holistic approach to coaching. My knowledge is forged in the furnace of manufacturing. Scars are my roadmap and a trophy case of my experiences. They come from a career that stretches back almost 50 years now.
My Services
I offer one-on-one coaching sessions, group coaching, workshops and classroom retreats. My areas of expertise include career coaching, project management, leadership coaching, and personal career development. I was working factory floors with a wrench in my hand as a very young man. Blue collar roots, and a desire to be more. From my early days as a factory maintenance person, to Operations leadership at both the plant and the corporate levels, my experiences and travels have given me a broad depth of understanding of the human element in manufacturing, and in work relationships. I grow people, and teams. Contact me today to learn more about my services.
SEND ME™: The Life That Built the Movement
By Mitchell Kirby – Founder, SEND ME™ Leadership
I was born in 1960, in Boone, Iowa—firstborn son of an alcoholic father and a mother doing her best to keep our family afloat. I was the oldest of four boys, with one older sister, but I became a father figure far earlier than I should have.
I showed signs of being smart. Top of the class thru grade school. Attendant during May Day Festival, A’s on the report card. Eyesight went screwy in 4th grade and ended up with the Clark Kent glasses, as that was all we could afford. Played baseball….pretty well. Shortstop. Picked up the trumpet in 4th grade also and seemed like I never needed to be practicing to keep first chair. Things seemed easy.
At 12 years old, my father was thrown out of the house. My mom’s three brothers showed up with a truck and moved us to the Ozarks. That moment split my life in half: the one where I was a child, and the one where I became the man of the house.
From that point on, childhood was over. While other kids went to practice or played outside, I was raising my brothers. I was the one making meals, doing homework, playing the man of the house role, that no one had taught me to play, and keeping order when I still didn’t know who I was. That early pressure became my proving ground. No fanfare. No praise. Just quiet survival. Discovered girls in High school. My first real physical separation from the boys. Smoking. And drinking stolen beers from friends' dads. Grades began to suffer but still maintained the lead role at home.
But when I graduated and moved out on my own, something snapped loose. The years I never got to live came rushing in. I chased rebellion with open arms—weed, psychedelics, bourbon, cocaine—anything to drown the pressure and find escape. I ran as far and as fast from my childhood parent role as I could. I spiraled fast. Two DUIs, wrecked cars, jails, several near-death experiences I still struggle to understand why I survived. Chaos. On the outside, I was just another statistic. But inside, I was a storm no one had ever taught to calm.
I entered rehab twice in my twenties. The first time didn’t stick. In fact it got worse. The second time changed my life. In that second rehab, I had what I now call my burning bush moment. I heard the voice of God. Clearly. Audibly. And in that Holy instant, I was delivered. The grip of addiction that had consumed every part of me was broken without warning or ceremony. Just gone. God reminded me I was His. Always.
That moment wasn’t just about sobriety. It was about surrender. What follows is the way I remember it…
I returned to life newly sober, with a wife and two sons depending on me to make something of this second chance. It was my wife who believed in the impossible. She told me I had the mind for more. She said I should become an engineer. That belief—hers, not mine—pushed me back to school. We scraped and paid my way through junior college. I earned honor society status and won a scholarship to a four-year Mechanical Engineering program.
From there, everything shifted.
I joined a major international food processor as a newly minted engineer. Blue collar roots, white collar role. I didn’t speak corporate. I spoke factory floor. That became my strength. I knew how to fix systems and help people. After several years of moving across the south learning the chicken, then the beef side of the engineering role I now held, I moved to Oregon for a juice processor job. It took only four months during an acquisition to rise from engineer to plant manager. I was built for this.
But just as I climbed the ladder, my wife—my best friend, my miracle—was falling into her own pit. She began to struggle with substances. The marriage unraveled. The pain built slowly, then all at once. One week before our divorce was to be finalized, she ended her life. Her note told the world that I was a good man, and she hoped whoever came next saw it too.
It shattered me.
And I didn’t tell a soul how broken I really was….
I quit my job but still buried myself in work. My phone had begun to ring. First with condolences, then offers to let me help fix the food processors of other companies, their people and leaders, their processes, etc. Jobs came with a regular cadence. Contracting thru turnovers, startups and team building became my life. New job sites, new teams, new processes became the norm. Tried to outrun grief. But it always caught up. I continued to drift from company to company, landing short term “fix it” roles that paid well but left me hollow. Each workplace seemed broken—politics, power plays, shallow leadership, undertrained mid level leaders struggling to figure things out. I kept trying to find my “forever job,” but none of them could see what I still carried. None of them could reach what I had become.
Somewhere in the aimless wandering, I had met another woman. Pretty. Wild. Dangerous. She had three kids and a destructive spirit. She was the party girl type after a restrictive marriage herself. Sleeping around, drinking too much, always fighting legal trouble. I just kept trying to “save” her. I was lonely, so I stayed longer than I should have, maybe out of guilt over my previous wife. We married. It didn’t last. But even that storm taught me something: not all growth is pretty. Not all teachers come wrapped in wisdom. Some come wrapped in warning.
But here’s the thing—through every pain, every failure, every misstep—my voice kept growing louder. People had long ago started, and now continued to call. Not because I had a perfect résumé, but because I had real answers. My leadership wasn’t theoretical—it was forged through tragedy, tested on factory floors and production lines, trialed in many ever-changing team dynamics and cultural expectations and sharpened by raising both a broken family and changing broken systems, and a heart for helping other people grow.
And this is where SEND ME™ was born.
Not in a boardroom. Not in a branding exercise. But in the trenches of life—where courage isn’t a buzzword, but a requirement. Where leadership isn’t about climbing—it’s about carrying. Carrying people. Carrying burdens. Carrying truth.
SEND ME™ isn’t just a name. It’s a response.
To every call no one else will answer.
To every team no one else sees.
To every broken leader trying to become whole.
To every next generation who needs to see someone go first.
My life is not an accident.
My pain is not wasted.
My story is not over.
I’ve spent years building a movement that isn’t about becoming a better leader in theory—it’s about becoming a creator in practice. About trading shallow influence for true impact. About shifting teams from direction to creation. About authenticity, not authority. About finding your voice, standing in the fire, and saying:
“Here I am. SEND ME.”
This movement is for leaders who are done pretending.
For teams who are tired of survival and ready to create.
For organizations who know that who you become is just as important as what you build.
What My Life Made of Me
It made me:
- A builder of people, not just processes.
- A survivor who became a shepherd.
- A leader with scars that speak louder than any résumé.
- A man who knows pain, has walked through fire, and still stands ready to serve.
And because of that, I lead with truth. I lead with purpose.
I lead with a fire that no longer burns to destroy, but to ignite others.
This is my story. This is SEND ME™. And this is just the beginning.