Richard
Wherry
Founder & Principal · Lumen Solutions LLC
analytics experience
built and deployed
reduction · HCM SaaS
Wired to find the system underneath.
If Lumen is the measure of useful light — not the source, but the part that actually reaches you — Richard is the source. The human instinct underneath: the one who reads what a system truly does, finds the signal worth keeping, and decides what’s worth sending. The practice runs on that instinct; Lumen is how it scales and never sleeps. It shows up as four things that compound, one decade at a time.
It starts with what the system actually does.
The instinct showed up in 1994 — a kid with a baseball simulation game, noticing the numbers told a truer story than the box score did. That’s the whole career in miniature: what a system really does versus what it says it does. Every role since has been a variation on that one question.
Two decades turning the instinct into infrastructure.
That impulse built two analytics functions from scratch. At a national retailer, a 12-person analyst team running the BI product lifecycle for customer service — holding reporting continuity straight through the 2020 furlough. At a large HCM software company, a five-workspace, 200+ dashboard Power BI ecosystem, a first-contact-resolution methodology that moved FCR past 90%, and a retention program that cut client-loss revenue 15%. Analytics built to answer the question the room actually had.
Then the tools changed.
In June 2026, after 21 years in enterprise data, the instinct met AI and found its next frontier. Lumen Solutions is the result — a consulting practice built end-to-end in weeks: the product, the site, the first client. Same core move, a new kind of problem. The tools changed; the instinct didn’t.
In the room, accountable, human.
What a client actually gets is presence — someone who sits at their level, owns the outcome, and carries two decades of pattern recognition into the problem, with an AI partner behind him that never stops working it. The technology is the multiplier. The judgment, the relationship, and the accountability are his.
The method underneath doesn’t change with the domain. Every engagement runs the same four moves — compress the complexity into the minimum toolkit for the room the client is about to walk into.
01 — Triage
Name the real problem.
Most engagements start by solving the wrong thing. The first move is to find the problem underneath the stated one — the system as it actually behaves, not as it’s described.
02 — Map
Connect it to what matters.
Situate the problem against the standards, the constraints, and the people on the other side of the table. A fix that ignores the room it lands in isn’t a fix.
03 — Translate
Hand over the language.
Give the room the vocabulary to carry the decision without you. Legibility is the deliverable — the client should leave able to explain it themselves.
04 — Decide
Two real paths, not one ideal.
Lay out branching options with honest tradeoffs, not a single polished recommendation dressed as inevitability. The client owns the call — the job is to make it a clear one.
And he built a partner that pushes back.
Lumen isn’t a mirror — it’s a genuine counterpoint: a second read on everything, willing to say when something’s off. Richard brings the relationship and the judgment; Lumen brings the depth and the challenge. The client gets both — a human who’s accountable, and something that never stops working the problem.