Erickimberling

Eric Kimberling is the CEO of Third Stage Consulting Group, a firm he founded to give organizations independent advice on ERP, CRM, and HCM software implementations. He built a YouTube channel with nearly a million subscribers by filling a gap he identified in the market: most ERP guidance, he argues, comes from consultants who are financially tied to specific vendors and therefore biased.

Third Stage Consulting Group is Eric Kimberling's consulting firm, which he leads as CEO and references throughout his content. The firm positions itself as technology-agnostic — meaning it does not receive referral fees or commissions from SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, or any other software vendor — so its advice is theoretically free from the conflicts of interest that Kimberling says plague most of the ERP advisory industry.

Kimberling explicitly avoids declaring a winner between SAP S/4HANA, Oracle Cloud ERP, and Microsoft Dynamics 365, which is the foundation of his technology-agnostic brand. His content covers all three platforms extensively, but the angle is almost always about how to evaluate, implement, and avoid failures across any of them — not which one is objectively best. He argues the right answer depends entirely on the organization's specific situation.

In content with that title, Kimberling argues that AI hype is pulling leadership attention and budget away from the fundamentals that actually determine whether a digital transformation succeeds — things like organizational readiness, realistic project scoping, and change management. His broader thesis is that AI is a useful tool being dangerously oversold as a shortcut that replaces the hard organizational work no software can do for you.

Technology-agnostic means Third Stage Consulting Group has no financial relationship with SAP, Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics, or other vendors, so Kimberling's team won't steer a client toward a platform because of a referral arrangement. He frames this independence as the core reason his channel and firm exist, repeatedly making the case on YouTube that the majority of ERP consulting advice in the industry is shaped by whoever is paying the advisor, not what is best for the client.

His content consistently points to a cluster of the same problems: vendor-biased advice that leads to the wrong software selection, chronic underinvestment in change management, scope gaps that software vendors conveniently leave out of their proposals, and organizations that are not operationally ready before going live. His video specifically titled around things missing from vendor scope frames many of these gaps as mandatory work that clients are never warned about upfront.

Kimberling's content aimed at private equity argues that PE-backed companies are especially at risk during digital transformations because compressed timelines and cost-reduction mandates clash directly with what complex ERP implementations actually require to succeed. He warns that PE firms tend to underestimate the organizational change burden of large-scale software rollouts, which leads to the expensive overruns and failed projects that destroy rather than create the value the acquisition was meant to generate.

Change management — preparing people, redesigning processes, and driving employee adoption — is the recurring centerpiece of Kimberling's content because he argues it is the most consistently underfunded and underplanned element of any ERP or digital transformation project. His position is that organizations routinely spend millions on software licenses while allocating almost nothing to the human side of the change, which is why expensive implementations frequently fail to deliver their promised return on investment.

His YouTube audience is overwhelmingly male and professional, with a strong concentration of viewers aged 25 and older — including a notable share of 45-plus viewers that reflects the seniority of people typically involved in enterprise technology decisions at large organizations. His top viewer countries — the United States, India, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Germany — map closely to where global ERP adoption and large-scale digital transformation spending is concentrated.

Yes, Kimberling is active on TikTok under the handle @erickimberling, where he posts shorter takes on digital transformation and ERP topics and promotes his longer YouTube content. YouTube is his primary platform by a wide margin — it's where his Macro-tier audience and most of his video depth lives — but TikTok gives him a secondary channel for reaching business professionals who consume content in shorter formats.