Choice Awareness Management

Our Origins

We founded our original company, Berritt, Inc., as an education consulting firm to create coaching/mentoring services and products. We intend to support businesses, professionals, and individuals for both personal and professional growth. We assist people in becoming better at what they are designed to be and do. Along our development pathway, during our formative years as a consulting business, we grew into something more powerful than we expected.

We first created Choice Awareness Management as our base brand and delivery mechanism for our services and products. But, we have since decided to take that power and turn it back to our clients via a revised belief-based model via Choice Awareness Management and fly under Benninghofen Company's banner.

A Decision to Consolidate

We were going to retain the Berritt, Inc. WordPress site for blogging and our other development sites. We have decided to consolidate all our blog articles, split equally between Choice Awareness Management and Benninghofen Company. We used all those sites as innovation venues for developing new ideas, services, and products, realizing we can do that right here.

The Idea Forms

Our corporation was originally thought of at our dining room table in Campbell, California the spring of 2001 by three people: 1) our founder Bob Benninghofen; 2) a partner in Deb B. who decided not to move forward after three months, and 3) our management consultant and advisor Sorin D. – to design and deliver data consulting business services.

The best name suggested by Deb was “Veritas,” meaning truth because she believed that our consulting services were to be based on truth, for us to become truth-tellers, all the while uncovering business truths through our client’s big data.

As a threesome, we shortened Veritas to Verit, selected a higher alphabetic ranking changing the V to B for Benninghofen, then doubling the r’s and t’s to become Berritt. We were thinking international: believing big that Berritt International could cover all our prospects. But, as some things go… it fell apart after Deb decided not to move forward. Completely dejected, Bob couldn’t get out of bed for two days. He managed to call two friends, who suggested getting into nature, being quiet, and get away for a few days. He immediately packed and took off.

A Course Correction

After a 48-hour stay-awake-no-talking sojourn to a monastery in Big Sur – new ideas began to flourish. Bob restarted down a different pathway deciding that truth would still be the centerpiece tenet and core belief. He thought it would be possible to turn a flashlight on people and their business to inspect what was occurring to help reveal challenges and issues. Flashlight Ideas was a second-generation name that didn’t last, but it allowed a return full circle to the Berritt name – mainly because of the truth-finding-and-telling focus that could become a cornerstone mission.

We are still fond of the Flashlight Ideas Logo design, especially because our graphic designer, Sarah of Right Left Design, created icons from different letters from the name. For us, the icon on this page is both a corporate-mission Icon and a Symbol of the staying-hold-of and being-cause in the idea and action of truth-finding and truth-telling.

Consolidating Companies

We allowed Berritt, Inc. (i.e., original S corporation established in 2001 in Delaware) to end in 2004. We established Choice Awareness Management and Benninghofen Company as sole proprietorships for tax purposes, which tree up into our general business partnership called “Lash Benninghofen Company.”