Wayward Leaders®
VFDs do not fail. Installations fail them.
On-site VFD training for maintenance teams and plant electricians, built backward from the faults that actually happen.
Wayward Leaders® is a veteran-owned VFD training practice. We teach maintenance teams and plant electricians to install, commission, and troubleshoot variable frequency drives correctly, in person, at the plant that owns the equipment, anywhere in the United States.
Every class ends with a scored competency assessment. The plant gets a way to prove what each technician can do, not a roster of who sat in the room.
The instruction is field-trained. It is drawn from nearly 8,000 VFD, power, and motor documents and from more than 750 commissioned drives captured through personal field experience and data collection. Carl Lee Tolbert, PhD, CMRP, and ATD Master Trainer™, leads it. He has delivered more than 5,000 hours of VFD instruction across 30 years and trained 8,000 industrial professionals, from International Paper to the U.S. Navy.
The premise is simple: VFDs do not fail. Installations fail them. The curriculum is built backward from that.
Installation, commissioning, troubleshooting, and fault diagnosis guides are published openly at waywardleaders.com.
The annual report
The State of the VFD 2026. Nineteen drive brands assessed, thirteen scored against a nine-dimension disclosure rubric, and seven places where the public record contradicts something the industry widely believes. Built from public documents only: no distributor portal, no vendor briefing, no manufacturer paid for placement or reviewed a draft.
Free, in a Plant Edition for the person writing a specification and a Channel Edition for the person quoting against one.