About

About Me

THE ATHLETE

David McMahon grew up in suburban Columbus, Ohio, the middle child of three, competing in every sport available from the time he could run. Football became his game, and he played it the way most kids from the Midwest play the sport they love best: with everything he had, for the team he was on, in whatever role the team needed him to fill. That last part turned out to be the most important part.

In high school, David was a linebacker with Division I ambitions. He earned his way onto the varsity roster as a sophomore. His team made the playoffs. He was contributing. Then, in his senior season, the coaches asked him to shift to the offensive line for the good of the team. It meant fewer snaps. It meant less visibility. It meant giving up the position he had built his identity around at the precise moment it mattered most for his recruiting. He said yes without hesitation. That instinct, putting the team ahead of personal interest when the moment actually costs something, became a defining characteristic. He would be asked to make that same choice again, and he would say yes again.

When it came time to choose a college, David chose Butler University, a basketball school in Indianapolis that competed in the Pioneer Football League. He was not the highest-recruited player on the roster. He was a late bloomer who wanted to earn playing time early and prove something to himself. He earned his first start as a freshman. Then, in his junior year, the coaches came to him again. They needed him at defensive end. Would he switch positions? He said yes. He went on to achieve the highest level of personal success of his football career at a position he had never played before. He learned that adaptability is not a concession. It is a form of commitment.

GRIT, PERSISTENCE, AND WHAT THE GRIND ACTUALLY TEACHES

College football at the Division I-AA level demands everything, and Butler football gave David an education in adversity that no MBA curriculum could replicate. During his five years on campus, he played through multiple head coaching changes and multiple coordinator changes. Every offseason brought new systems, new expectations, and new relationships to build from scratch. The players who stayed and competed through that instability were not the ones who were comfortable. They were the ones who had decided that the locker room mattered more than the circumstances.

His senior season was his hardest. The team went 0-11. He played only two games before a nagging injury sidelined him, earning a medical redshirt. He watched from the sideline as teammates he had ground through offseasons with absorbed one loss after another. He considered transferring as a graduate. In the end, he returned for a fifth year to pursue his MBA because he was unwilling to leave on those terms. He wanted one more season with a new coaching staff and the teammates who had stayed. He was not chasing a record or a ring. He was chasing something harder to name: the chance to compete one more time alongside people who had earned his trust the hard way.

The offseasons were where the real formation happened. Those months of early mornings, shared physical suffering, and collective investment in a goal bigger than any one person created the kind of camaraderie that does not dissolve when the going gets hard. Nobody talks enough about that dimension of team sports. When your peers are that invested in a common purpose, the temptation to cut corners quietly disappears. The brotherhood holds you accountable in ways that no coach, no policy, and no organizational chart ever could. That is the lesson David has carried into every team he has built since. It is not a metaphor. It is a management philosophy.

THE BUTLER WAY AND WHAT IT ACTUALLY MEANS

Butler University is known for basketball. But the principles that built its basketball program permeate every corner of that campus, and David absorbed them as a football player who competed in the shadow of Hinkle Fieldhouse for five years. The Butler Way traces back to coach Tony Hinkle and is grounded in five principles inscribed in the men's basketball locker room: humility, passion, unity, servanthood, and thankfulness. They are not complicated ideas. What makes them powerful is the consistency with which they are lived out, not announced.

David witnessed those principles in practice, and they stayed with him. A young assistant basketball coach named Brad Stevens, years before the world knew who Brad Stevens was, used to walk through the athletic training room to check on players from other sports entirely, asking about their recoveries, their families, their lives. He was not their coach. He had nothing to gain from those conversations. He just showed up because that was how Butler people operated. That image of a leader who extends care beyond his own team and interests became a standard David has tried to live up to ever since.

Humility, for David, means knowing the difference between confidence and arrogance, and choosing to lead from the former. Passion means committing fully or not at all, with no room for half-measures. Unity means that individual success is meaningful only when the team succeeds together. Servanthood means that a leader's job is to make the people around them better. And thankfulness means recognizing that no accomplishment is solo; that every team, every mentor, every early-morning conversation in a weight room contributed to whatever you are today. David has tested those principles across fifteen years of professional life and they have not failed him once.

BILL CAMPBELL, THE TRILLION DOLLAR COACH, AND A DIFFERENT KIND OF LEADERSHIP EDUCATION

Through his participation in the William V. Campbell Trophy Leadership Summit at Stanford University, David encountered a body of thinking that put formal language to instincts he had been acting on for years. Bill Campbell, who coached at Columbia University before becoming one of Silicon Valley's most influential executive coaches, worked with Steve Jobs, Eric Schmidt, Sheryl Sandberg, and dozens of other leaders who built the companies that define modern technology. He asked for nothing in return. He believed the role of a coach was to serve the people being coached, to help them become better leaders and better human beings, and to build teams that were capable of outlasting any individual contribution.

The Trillion Dollar Coach, the book that documented Campbell's philosophy after his passing, centers on a few core convictions that David recognized immediately: the team always comes before the individual, trust is the foundation that makes everything else possible, and the most important investment a leader can make is in the people around them. Campbell used to tell the executives he coached that if you are a great manager, your people will make you a leader. David had learned a version of that truth on a football field. Hearing it articulated through the lens of the companies that shaped the modern economy made its reach feel larger and its application feel more urgent.

David has attended the Campbell Trophy Summit three consecutive years, in 2023, 2024, and 2025, and is registered for 2026. The Summit brings together former Campbell Trophy nominees alongside prominent CEOs, entrepreneurs, and Silicon Valley leaders for three days of conversation about what it means to build something that matters and lead with integrity. At one of these gatherings, he heard Andrew Luck describe football as one of the most phenomenal vehicles for human development. Luck had walked away from the NFL at the peak of his career to protect something he valued more than the platform. That kind of decision, prioritizing the right thing over the easy thing, the human thing over the institutional thing, is the kind of leadership David has tried to model every day since Butler.

THE CAREER, AND WHAT IT WAS BUILDING TOWARD

After graduate school, David built a career spanning financial services and operational compliance, and five and a half years as a Franchise Operations Consultant at Byrider, where he served as a strategic business partner to a portfolio of franchise locations. The work required him to earn trust fast, coach senior leadership on P&L management and operational discipline, facilitate difficult performance conversations, and support new store launches from vendor negotiations through staff development. It was consulting, coaching, and organizational capacity building, done in a sector where the margin for error was clear and the stakes were real.

After a year advising the nation's fastest-growing healthcare franchise on organizational development and growth strategy, David made a deliberate pivot. He joined NetReputation in October 2019 as a Reputation Analyst, intentionally starting at the ground level before moving into leadership. That choice was not accidental. He had seen too many leaders manage work they did not understand. He wanted to know the business from the inside before he had authority over it. Within three months, he was promoted to Director of Client Services. Within three years, he was Vice President.

As VP, David has been part of the leadership team that grew NetReputation from $5 million to $19 million in revenue by building new service lines, including content removal, autocomplete repair, Wikipedia management, content publication partnerships, and review management software upgrades, and by creating the team culture and operational infrastructure to deliver them at scale. He adopted AI tools in mid-2023 to modernize suppression delivery, onboarding workflows, and reporting systems. He manages a global team of 30+ professionals across 5 countries. His team's retention rate holds at 80 to 89 percent. His NPS scores sit consistently in the high 80s across individual, SMB, and enterprise clients. Those numbers reflect a culture, not a mandate.

SARASOTA, THE NEXT CHAPTER, AND WHAT HE IS BUILDING NOW

David lives and works in Sarasota, Florida, where he is active in the local business community and invested in the people and organizations that make this region worth being part of. In 2025, he began coaching his son's competitive soccer team, bringing the same philosophy to the sideline that he brings to the office: a good coach makes the people around them better, and the most lasting thing you can give a team is a culture they want to stay in.

He is a Butler University MBA with a Bachelor of Science in Finance, an inaugural member of the National Football Foundation's Hampshire Honor Society, a 2005 NCAA Leadership Conference representative, and a Division I-AA Academic All-Star. He is currently exploring senior executive opportunities in digital services, organizational leadership, and capacity building, with a particular interest in roles that allow him to build something meaningful alongside people who care about doing it right.

There is a particular feeling that comes over him when Hinkle Fieldhouse appears on television. It has nothing to do with basketball. It comes from knowing what he left in that building: the early mornings, the accountability, the shared investment in something bigger than any one player. That is where he became the leader he is. He has spent fifteen years trying to pass it on.