Thomas Berkley — From Cleveland to Eight Figures
Thomas Berkley is an entrepreneur, United States Air Force veteran, and the founder of CSM Collective — a training and placement program based in Cleveland, Ohio. His story doesn't start in a business school or a startup incubator. It starts in uniform, where he spent ten years learning the kind of discipline, accountability, and systems-thinking that most people never develop.
The Military Foundation
Thomas Berkley joined the United States Air Force at 18 years old and served for a decade. That period shaped everything that came after. The Air Force doesn't just teach technical skills — it instills a way of operating: structured, accountable, mission-focused. Thomas carried that operating system into every business he built after leaving service.
What made Thomas different from most veterans transitioning into entrepreneurship was that he didn't wait until he got out to start. He began studying business, sales systems, and marketing while still on active duty — developing the mental models that would eventually drive over $10 million in verified sales across his companies.
Building From Scratch
Thomas Berkley entered entrepreneurship in 2018, shortly after leaving the Air Force. He didn't have investors, a business partner, or a built-in network. What he had was the discipline to execute consistently and the ability to build systems that didn't depend on him being in the room every hour.
Over the following years, Thomas built and scaled multiple companies — generating over $10 million in total lifetime sales and earning recognition from ClickFunnels, one of the world's largest marketing software platforms. He was awarded the Two Comma Club Award for generating over $1 million through a single funnel, and later the 10X Award — membership into the Eight Figure Club — for surpassing $10 million in total sales. Both of those recognitions are rare. Very few operators earn them without significant outside capital or a large team.
During this period Thomas also had the opportunity to work directly with Kevin Harrington — the original Shark from ABC's Shark Tank and one of the pioneers of the modern infomercial industry. Harrington's team reached out after seeing marketing campaigns Thomas had built for local home service businesses. The collaboration involved managing marketing campaigns for Harrington's clients through his company American Entrepreneur — an experience that gave Thomas a front-row seat to how high-level operators think about client acquisition, brand positioning, and scale.
Identifying the Gap — Why Thomas Berkley Founded CSM Collective
Across every company he built and every business he consulted with, Thomas Berkley kept seeing the same structural problem: businesses pour enormous resources into acquiring clients and almost nothing into keeping them. The sales team gets all the attention. The onboarding process gets ignored. Clients don't achieve the results they were promised. Churn increases. Revenue stagnates.
The person who could fix that problem — a trained Client Success Manager — either didn't exist inside the business or was handling it without any real framework. Thomas realized that the gap wasn't just a client retention problem. It was also a career opportunity problem. There were motivated remote professionals who had strong communication skills, high emotional intelligence, and the ability to manage relationships — but no clear path into a high-income role that used those strengths.
CSM Collective was built to solve both sides of that problem at once. On one side: train and certify Client Success Managers with a real framework for delivering outcomes and retaining clients. On the other side: place those certified CSMs inside online businesses doing $35,000 per month or more, where the need is real and the budget exists to support the role. The result is a system that helps businesses grow more profitably while creating genuine income opportunities for everyday professionals — no sales experience required.
Where Thomas Berkley Is Now
Thomas Berkley is currently based in Cleveland, Ohio, where he operates CSM Collective full time. He went full time on CSM Collective in May 2026 after building the infrastructure, curriculum, and placement system over the prior years. To date, over 100 professionals have been trained and placed through the program into online businesses across the country.
Thomas is focused on scaling CSM Collective's reach — both the number of businesses served and the number of professionals placed. His belief is that client retention is the most underleveraged growth lever in online business, and that the CSM role is one of the most undervalued career paths in the remote work economy. CSM Collective exists to change both of those things.
