In the late 1980s, telecom was king. The industry had just been deregulated; in a battle over market share, telecom carriers waged aggressive telemarketer campaigns to persuade households to switch their long distance carriers. Both Steve’s parents had jobs at Sprint, a telecom giant. Telecommunications, Steve figured, would be his industry. “To me, this is what I do. It’s what we talked about at the dinner table,” he says.

Early in his college years, Steve had an experience that might be the reason he’s so careful and analytical. His freshman year at the University of Kansas, he joined a fraternity and lived in a house where he admittedly “had a little too much fun.” That spring he went on a road trip to visit a friend and was a passenger in a horrific car accident. “I was with a fraternity brother of mine. He wasn’t drinking because he knew he was going to drive,” Steve recalls. “Well, after I kept him out too late, he fell asleep at the wheel, hit a parked car on the side of the road, and the car basically collapsed on us. The car was even on fire, but luckily my buddy had enough strength to pull me out of the car. I have pictures of this car after the accident; it was absolutely destroyed.” After 2 weeks of hospitalization and a year filled with surgery and rehabilitation, Steve and his friend recovered.

Many people were surprised he’d lived. For instance, during his recovery at home, an insurance adjustor came to assess some damage at his parent’s home. The adjustor saw his casts and started asking about the accident with a stunned expression on his face. “He said, ‘I was the guy who appraised your car, and I was pretty sure that anyone in that car was dead,’” Steve recalls. Even though doctors told him he might never walk again, he recovered fully.

“That’s what you call a ‘wakeup call,’” Steve says. Even though he was only 19 years old, Steve started looking at his life and where he was going. “I decided I needed to focus and get done what I needed to get done.” He switched schools and enrolled at Kansas State University, which didn’t have a chapter of his fraternity. After a few months, he started a deejay business with some friends, playing music at sorority and fraternity parties. “We kind of mixed having fun and making money at the same time,” he says. “That was my first opportunity to figure out business, though it was still more of a hobby at the time. I figured out how to get new business, how to sell.”

At graduation from KSU, Steve at first figured he’d move to Chicago, one of his favorite cities. But by then he had gotten into the habit of stepping back and looking hard at his decisions. In reality, he saw that Chicago would be fun, but it would be better to buckle down and get a job at Sprint, the biggest employer in Kansas City, where he hoped to learn discipline and training in a specialty.

His first job was in telemarketing sales where he cold-called small businesses all day long. “It was good business experience,” he says. “You talk to a bunch of characters when you’re doing this.” Steve even met one of his girlfriends through the telemarketing job, when he talked to a young woman who was in Florida working as office manager for her father’s electrician business. The job wasn’t horrible, “but it didn’t feel like I was applying anything I’d learned in college,” Steve says.

Before long, his contacts at Sprint landed him a job in billing at a company that sold long distance service to nonprofit organizations. The company was an affinity marketer; it sold long distance services to nonprofit organizations, and a percentage of each paid bill went back to the nonprofit. Most of the nonprofits the company worked with were churches; telemarketers would play voice recordings from each church’s pastor, telling them how important it was for them to sign up for this program so that their phone bills would help their church raise funds.

His first business trip with this company was to a national religious broadcasters conference in Nashville. “Here I am, a back office guy,” recalls Steve, who is Jewish. “The group would go into a hotel room before the day started, and they would pray together. I stayed separate. After a while, I thought, ‘Maybe this isn’t the place for me.’”

Still, Steve felt he was learning some skills in billing, so he switched to the competition. His new employer, Houston-based Equalnet, also sold long distance services with a whole new level of resources and energy. Here, Steve had a better atmosphere, a bigger title—Director of Billing—a bigger salary, and he learned everything there was to know about billing systems.

There were some challenges, though. First, he’d been hired from outside, so he had people on staff who were disappointed they hadn’t received his job. Second, he didn’t get any management training to prepare him for the job. “I knew the trade, but I didn’t know how to manage people. I didn’t understand leadership,” Steve says. “Somebody would come into my office, they’d want to tell me an issue, they’d want to vent. I might be answering email and listening to them at the same time, not giving them my whole attention.”

This is a pretty common problem. And Steve did what most people do: He muddled through as best he could. After all, no one was offering him any leadership either. “They were a bunch of young entrepreneurs. They didn’t really focus much on management, but focused on getting business done,” he recalls.

Eventually, Steve caught the eye of a headhunter. During the course of the phone interview, he figured out the company he was being recruited for was none other than Sprint PCS, a joint venture between some cable companies and Sprint. Steve saw that his strategy of learning a marketable skill had paid off. He jumped at the opportunity to work at Sprint PCS and moved back to Kansas City to be the head of his own group.

Now, at age 27, Steve’s career at Sprint PCS took off with a bang. The company put him on a team where his first task was to speak at a board meeting and show evidence that the company should build a wholesale billing services group. Because that billing group would compete with the direct sales channel, it had some opposition. “We had a bit of time to justify why we ought to start wholesale,” recalls Steve, who had a quick e-minute part in the conversation. “It was my first entreé to this c-level boardroom world. It was very cool.”

Luckily, the board decided to grow the wholesale services group, and Steve grew it to a staff of over 30. “Since I’d managed two other billing groups, I knew what had to happen,” he says. “We were our own small billing company within Sprint PCS.”

Steve also began to attend classes for his MBA at the company’s expense, and he learned how to give performance appraisals and how to lead people. He was even invited into the director development program at Sprint PCS. As part of that program, he acquired a mentor.

Here is where Steve stopped to analyze where he was going. He thought it was going pretty well until he asked his mentor for advice. His mentor told him to stop being a “subject matter expert” and focus on being someone who sees the big picture. Steve took his advice. “As a manager,” he says, “I moved farther away from the technical track and more toward the soft side of how to motivate people, how to manage people, even when there were lots of layoffs and very little growth activity.”

And his mentor told him something that surprised Steve: Get out of billing. If he got promoted in that track, he’d be stuck there forever. As Steve puts it, billing was “too niche and didn’t really match my true passion, which was to be on the ‘outside’ dealing with customers face to face.” If he ever wanted to move from Sprint or into a more dynamic role, his mentor advised, Steve must do it before he got a huge promotion in billing.

So Steve began a well-planned campaign to move into business development. This was nearly impossible because the company rarely moved people from operations to the more sought-after roles in business development. When he finally got an interview for a job in business development, Steve prepared by researching his interviewer. He found out the guy was very proud of his graduate degree from the University of Chicago. So Steve walked into his office and immediately commented on the diploma on the wall. “Oh, that’s a fantastic school,” he said. “After that, we really synched up well.” The last step in the process was an interview with a vice president, who had come to Sprint from McKinsey & Co. So Steve dutifully read the book The McKinsey Way, a behind-the-scenes look at the consulting firm. From the book, he learned “these people at McKinsey always have three reasons for everything they do,” Steve says. “I kind of slipped in some of the McKinsey-isms during the interview. And in my follow-up letter I wrote, ‘Three reasons why you need to hire me.’” His extra effort paid off, and Steve got his foot in the door at business development.

“I got lots of good experience,” says Steve, whose first challenge was to find a way to partner with Microsoft. Over a few years time, as he did more and more deals, he rose to senior manager of strategic business development. Steve was invited to speak at industry conferences. His star was rising.

Just when he was hitting his stride, Steve sat down and had another hard look at his options to plan and navigate his future. Even though he was out of billing and in business development, he was uneasy staying at Sprint PCS. He saw it would take ages for him to rise above the level of senior manager and into the higher ranks. “If there’s any time that I want to leave, this is the time,” he says. It was time to change course.

Steve started looking around for an emerging market where he could use his business development skills. One of the best places to look was at business conferences, which was where he met the Omnilink Systems people as they lined up to approach Sprint with a proposal for a business partnership. When Steve first met with the Omnilink founder, he said, “You have 10 minutes. Tell me what you got.” As the founder described the tracking product, Steve was interested—and not just on behalf of Sprint. When Steve asked the founder how he would put together a management team, he said the first hire would be the business development person. And, the founder added, “Let me know if you know anybody.” Steve correctly took that as a hint of an invitation to join the startup. In that moment, he began to think about it.

Four months later, he jumped to Omnilink Systems. The startup, launched in 2003, is built around web-based software that can locate people wearing a monitoring device, whether they are indoors or outdoors. It’s great for tracking paroled convicts or nonviolent criminals who are sentenced to home confinement but allowed to go to work each day. Omnilink’s technology is even being used to keep track of Alzheimer’s disease patients and to find lost pets.

Even though the bulk of Omnilink’s customers are in law enforcement, part of Steve’s job is to uncover the many uses for this technology. And he didn’t burn any bridges at Sprint, which has actually become a strategic partner with Omnilink.

If Steve hadn’t sat back several times over his career and charted a course, he might still be toiling for a promotion in a billing department somewhere. Lucky for him, he’s in a stimulating job as a vice president; the first employee after the founders in a company that now has 43 employees and is still growing. In addition to a great salary, he has an ownership stake in a company that could pay off big someday. His story shows the power of taking control and charting your course. After all, it’s more risky to close your eyes and ignore the direction in which you’re heading, so go ahead and follow the stars.