Gene Monterastelli hails from Casper, Wyoming, which, with its long roads, has a “really strong sense of interconnectedness throughout the whole state.” Similarly, his work over the last 20 years focuses on connecting with others, helping them move past crippling hurdles, and becoming the strongest versions of themselves personally and professionally.
All of my clients have some sort of genius, but they don’t have the infrastructure to share that genius with the world in the most efficient way. So when I do a good job helping them, I set them up to be a greater agent of change in the world.
After getting a computer science degree (“I wrote up my first lines of computer code in 1986,” he says. “I was that dorky kid”) and working for the large consulting firm Andersen Consulting (now Accenture), Monterastelli quit his day job—on October 3, 1997 to be exact—and has been self-employed ever since. As one-half of the APeX Ministries duo, the 42-year-old evangelist travels all over the U.S. and Canada with his friend Brad Farmer, using sketch comedy and storytelling as a way of entertaining and enlightening middle school and high school students. (He’s even freed himself from a straitjacket in the process.) When not on the road, the Brooklyn resident is at WeWork Williamsburg heading Tapping Q & A, where he helps small business owners “eliminate self-sabotage.” In other words, says Monterastelli, “half of the work I do is just traditional business coaching, and half is figuring out the emotional reason why they’re not taking the action they’re taking.”