My Story
Ian’s journey to Ian Tonks Companies began in the late 1990s, when he spent seven years running a 650-person company that provided youth sports programming to a variety of professional sports organizations, including Major League Soccer, the NFL and Jack Nickalus’ Golden Bear International.
After getting married in 2006, he traded the grind of 100,000+ flight miles a year for the short commute to a private Bay Area University, where he led several capital fundraising campaigns and saw the institution through its transition to NCAA division 2.
In 2009, seeking to break free from academic bureaucracy, he launched a business development practice to pursue his true passion and purpose: helping business leaders plan more strategically, grow more reliably, and maximize the talent in their companies. His first business book, “Replacing the Rainmaker”, published in 2015, was an homage to six years spent in the trenches with an amazing collection of business visionaries.
Today, fusing two plus decades of executive and entrepreneurial experience, he splits time helping entrepreneurs get more from their businesses, teaching accountants to better serve their clients and win more work, providing in-house coaching, training and staff development to small and mid-size companies, and developing easier ways to coach youth sports.
Ian holds a bachelor’s degree in sports science from the University of Northumbria and an MBA in strategic leadership from Dominican University of California. His passions include exercise, golf, family and travel. A native of England, he lives in Palm Desert, California, with his wife and daughter.