Jonathan Eldridge is the founder of Soul Focus, LLC, a Michigan-based leadership development practice, and the former Chief Experience Officer of Eight Eleven Group, where he spent 22 years helping build the firm from a single Michigan office into a multi-division national staffing company.
The Career Arc
Eldridge’s career runs almost entirely through one company, which makes the shape of it unusual in an industry known for turnover, where producers change firms the way their consultants change assignments. He joined Eight Eleven Group early and opened its first Michigan office in Novi in 2002, building the market from nothing in the firm’s home state, developing the client relationships, the candidate pipelines, and the team that turned an address into an operating business.
Four years later, he relocated to Philadelphia to establish the company’s first East Coast presence, and the operation he built there became the anchor of a regional business he went on to run across Detroit, Columbus, Philadelphia, and New York City. He closed his tenure with more than six years leading the company’s Experience function, first as Executive Vice President and then as Chief Experience Officer, working across its three divisions, Brooksource, Medasource, and Calculated Hire, its client base, and its thousands of placed consultants.
Building Markets from Zero
The defining chapter of Eldridge’s career is the building itself. Opening Novi meant starting a market from scratch, but at least on familiar ground, in a state where he knew the industry landscape and the company’s name carried weight. Philadelphia in 2006 was a different problem entirely: a city where the firm had no footprint, no name recognition, and no established relationships to lean on. Everything that had carried the first build had to be earned again from the beginning, client by client and hire by hire. The market took hold, and over the following years it grew from a single outpost into the anchor of the firm’s East Coast operation.
That progression, producer to market builder to regional leader to executive, tracked the company’s own growth into a national staffing leader. Staffing is an industry where the product is people, and running it at regional scale meant managing both sides of that equation at once: the clients betting on the firm’s judgment and the consultants whose careers moved through its placements. By the time Eldridge stepped into the Chief Experience Officer seat, his remit covered how the company’s employees, clients, and consultants across the country experienced the firm, a mandate spanning all three divisions, which he held through his final six years.
The Author and the Framework
Out of those years running teams and markets came the CARE Framework, the leadership approach Eldridge developed across his time at Eight Eleven Group, drawn from what two decades of building and leading teams had shown him about why people stay, perform, and follow. It is the framework that now anchors his speaking and workshop practice.
Alongside it came a book, Struggle to Strength: How Authentic, Relatable Leadership Shapes Success, an Amazon #1 bestseller in Mentoring & Coaching that also reached the top ten in Business Leadership. The book’s backdrop is personal as much as professional: four knee replacements, relearning to walk four times, and a 70-pound weight loss, the setbacks that ran alongside the career and shaped the perspective he now teaches from. The title is not a slogan; it is the sequence he lived, in the office and out of it.
What’s Next
In February 2025, after 22 years inside one company, Eldridge founded Soul Focus, LLC. He now delivers keynotes and leadership development workshops for organizations and their leadership teams, drawing on two decades of operating experience in staffing to work with companies on engagement, retention, and team performance. His current engagements include leadership development work with one of Michigan’s largest architecture, engineering, and construction firms, and his signature talk, Live the Day, is in development as the speaking practice grows alongside the workshop side of the business.
Jonathan Eldridge Today
Jonathan Eldridge is based in South Lyon, Michigan, where Soul Focus, LLC operates. The career divides cleanly into two acts: 22 years building markets, leading teams, and running the experience of a national firm, and now the work of teaching organizations what those years taught him. The second act rests entirely on the first, which is precisely what makes it credible.
