Inspiring Conversations with Jack Murphy of Motion 3 Technology

Today we’d like to introduce you to Jack Murphy.

Jack, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
**The Company I Built on a Lie**

It’s July 2011, and I’m standing in the middle of a summer camp, and I am the camp director. Which means I am responsible for several hundred children, a staff of counselors who are mostly teenagers, and — because I happen to know more about technology than anyone else in the building — every computer, every server, every router, and every printer that decides to stop working at 9 PM on a Tuesday.

My job title is Camp Director. My actual job, the one buried in the fine print of my contract, is “other duties as assigned.”

And I have a six-month-old at home.

I want to tell you that I woke up one morning with a vision. That I had a plan. That I am the kind of person who makes brave, clear-eyed decisions about his life.

I am not that person.

What actually happens is this: I wake up one morning in the middle of July, and I realize I am not in love with my job anymore. I’m angry. I’m angry at my boss. I’m angry that “other duties as assigned” has quietly eaten the job I was actually hired to do. And underneath all of that, there’s a baby at home who I barely see.

So I do what any rational person with a newborn and no savings would do.

I lie.

I tell my boss I’m leaving to start a technology company.

Now — here’s the thing. That was not true. What I actually wanted to do was start a leadership and facilitation company. I wanted to teach. I wanted to do the work I had been doing with counselors, but for grown-ups.

But there’s a problem. The camp I work for *is* a leadership and facilitation company. They have an entire department dedicated to business and leadership development — adult clients, corporate retreats, the whole thing. And a few months earlier, every single one of us had signed a non-compete. So the company I actually wanted to start was the one company I was legally not allowed to start.

A technology company, though? A technology company was fine. A technology company tracked. Because of “other duties as assigned,” it tracked perfectly. She nodded. She said good for you.

I had until October. October was my date. And from July to October, I told that lie so many times — to my boss, to my coworkers — that one morning in September I woke up and the thought in my head was:

*I can do this. I can start a technology company.*

The lie had moved in.

So October comes. I have a newborn. I have no clients. I have no office. I have a mission statement I wrote on a piece of paper that says: *strategy and education — diminish support.* Because those were the things I thought every technology company I’d ever worked with was missing. They sold you the box and dropped it off. They were never concerned with how the box fit into your business, or how you were actually supposed to use it. And when the box didn’t fit, support became the whole relationship.

And then I spend the next five years getting lost.

If my Garmin GPS could narrate the first five years of my company, it would just be one long loop of *rerouting… rerouting… rerouting.* I took the clients I could get. I did the work they asked for. I fixed the printers. I patched the servers. I showed up when things broke. And slowly, without ever deciding to, I became exactly the kind of technology company I had started my company to *not* be.

It’s like cars. Have you ever stood in a parking lot and tried to tell a Honda from a Toyota from a Hyundai? They all converged. They all decided what a car looks like, and now they all look like that. That was my business. I had a different name on the door, but I was the same car.

The hardest part of this story is not the lie. The hardest part is the five years I spent being successful at the wrong thing.

And then one day — and I wish I had a better story about how this happened, I wish there was a thunderclap — one day I said it out loud. To myself. That I had drifted. That the company I built on a lie had told me the truth about what I wanted, and I had stopped listening to it.

So I rerouted. One more time. And this time I had language for it. Fractional Chief Information Officer. Which is a fancy way of saying: I’ll do the strategy first, and the education second, and if we do those two things right, you will need a whole lot less of the third thing — the support, the panic, the 9 PM Tuesday.

Strategy. Education. Support — in that order, not the other way around.

That’s Motion 3 Technology today. We work with forward-thinking companies — defense contractors chasing CMMC certification, financial advisors navigating compliance, growing businesses that have outgrown the break-fix model — and we sit on their side of the table. Not as the vendor selling the box. As the person helping them decide whether they need the box at all.

The clients we have now are not the clients I had in year three. The clients we have now hired us because they wanted a thinking partner, not a help desk. They wanted someone to nudge them forward toward operational excellence, not just keep the lights on.

And when I look at the work we’re doing for them — when a client tells me their team finally understands the *why* behind a security control, or when a CEO calls me before making a decision instead of after — that’s the company I told my boss I was starting in 2011.

It just took me about a decade to stop lying about it.

I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
Ha — there’s a great philosopher whose last name escapes me, but she taught me that no matter how bumpy the road, no matter what the struggle is, “just keep swimming.”

~Dory. The fish.

I struggled to remember the original mission of my company, and for a long time I got lost being something I never intended to be. It was like one of those promises you make as a kid — when I’m an adult, I will never do X, Y, or Z — and then you grow up and realize that being an adult means you actually do have to do Z sometimes. But you didn’t have to do X and Y. My company was doing all three, and it took me a long minute to find my way back to the original promise I’d made to myself.

Thanks – so what else should our readers know about Motion 3 Technology?
We help companies see how their technology fits into their quest for operational excellence. Golfers will tell you that you can never achieve the perfect swing — but the journey toward that swing is what keeps you coming back to the game. We don’t believe in perfect, and we don’t believe in perfection. We believe in the journey, and we like to walk it with our clients holding two simple questions: how do we get better instead of worse, and how do we move forward instead of backward?

It is our job to help the companies we work with see how their technology fits into this conversation.

Is there anyone you’d like to thank or give credit to?
Credit goes to a strange group of people. First, my former boss — for making me angry enough to leave. I don’t think she knows it, but that frustration was the push I needed, and I’m genuinely grateful for it. Second, my high school wrestling coach, who taught me the Dory philosophy long before Dory existed: just keep swimming. He called it something else — tenacity — but it’s the same lesson. When the match is hard, when the season is long, when nothing is working, you keep moving. That’s been the through-line of every hard year I’ve had in business.
And finally, the entrepreneurs in my family — my parents and my wife’s parents. None of them sat me down and gave me a master class on starting a company. They did something more important than that. They showed me, just by living their lives, that you don’t die if you try. That an idea can become a business, that a business can feed a family, and that the worst case scenario of starting something is almost never as bad as you think it is. When I was lying to my boss in 2011, I wasn’t brave. I was just surrounded by people who had already proven it was survivable.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://motion3.tech
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jack-murphy-4674a731