04 About
A family firm.
Every Stoner Advisory Group engagement is led by the firm's principal or one of its partners, who stays your contact for the life of the work. The principal and partners bring 35 years of combined school district experience in operations and bond management. Senior consultants in finance, purchasing, IT security, software, electrical and energy check the work behind them. Nothing gets handed off to junior staff.
John D. Stoner · Rochester Hills, MI
John D. Stoner
Principal · Owner's Representative · every site walk, personally
John has spent more than thirty years inside Michigan public school facilities. He started as a facility engineer on the $100 million bond that built Stoney Creek High School from the ground up, then served as Director of Operations at Bloomfield Hills Schools and at Rochester Community Schools, where he ran a $23 million annual operating budget, 250-plus employees, and 23 buildings totaling 2.5 million square feet. His focus was on efficiency, cutting costs, and contract negotiations. He was also instrumental in managing all capital improvements, including bond-related work.
He founded Stoner Advisory Group in 2015 to give districts the thing he never had as an operations director: an advocate with an owner's instincts, managing costs and understanding what it takes to operate a large district. He also wanted to make sure the owner had a voice in the design and the construction. Since then he has represented nine public clients across more than $750 million of capital programs, including the $123 million Pontiac bond program run to final reconciliation, and current programs at L'Anse Creuse ($188.7M, 20 buildings) and Berkley ($99M). That work has included setting up the financial controls for each district's bond program.
His practice runs deeper than schedule and budget: environmental work in asbestos, lead, and indoor air quality that led to an invitation to testify before the Michigan Senate as an expert witness; energy programs that brought 17 schools to Energy Star certification; and the presidency of MISEC, Michigan's school energy consortium. Michigan State University, class of 1984, twice over: degrees from the Eli Broad College of Business and the College of Communication Arts.
Eric Stoner
Eric Stoner
Partner · Technology & Business Operations
Eric builds the reporting and financial-controls machinery behind every SAG engagement: the cost tracking, dashboards, and board-ready reconciliation that let a district see its program's position at any moment, to the dollar, against its own general ledger.
He brings that discipline from a career running partnerships and operations at national scale. As Senior Director of Partnerships at Shipt/Target, he grew a partnership business from $5 million to $193 million in revenue and structured programs with Visa, Apple, and major national retailers. That is the standard of financial rigor and vendor accountability he applies to school construction dollars.
A Michigan State University graduate and Michigan native, Eric anchors the firm's program-controls practice. And yes, he's John's son. Succession is built into the firm: districts sign with Stoner Advisory Group knowing the practice, its records, and its standards outlast any single engagement.
Sarah Stoner, P.E.
Sarah Stoner, P.E.
Partner · Capital Projects & Facility Systems
Sarah is a Michigan-licensed Professional Engineer with a mechanical engineering degree from Michigan State University and more than a decade of plant engineering, capital projects, and operations behind her. That background helps a district ask the right questions of its own architects and engineers about the mechanical, utility, and building systems that make up most of a school bond program.
She spent eleven years at Hemlock Semiconductor in Hemlock, Michigan. As a reliability engineer she kept boilers, air compressors, pumps, heat exchangers, and instrumentation running, led root-cause investigations of equipment failures, and delivered capital projects during plant shutdowns alongside skilled trades and construction contractors. As a manufacturing engineer she delivered $2.38 million in annual electrical savings, and as an economic evaluator she built the cash-flow analyses behind capital spending decisions. She went on to lead the site's learning and development program for more than 1,600 employees, negotiating vendor contracts and preparing the site for ISO 9001 quality audits.
She is John's daughter and Eric's sister, and, like both of them, a Michigan State graduate. At Stoner Advisory Group she brings that capital-project discipline to the district's side of the table.
Leonard Wheeler
Leonard Wheeler
Consultant · IT & Security
Leonard advises Stoner Advisory Group on the security and network side of BondControls™. He reviews how the portal and the program inbox control access and protect district records, and he helps the firm prepare its answers when a district's IT department sends a security questionnaire.
He runs the network for a community health center that serves more than 65,000 patients a year at more than 50 sites. He is the first call when a clinic loses its connection, and he manages the firewall rules, network segmentation and remote access that keep patient records protected under HIPAA. He led the move from Cisco Catalyst to Meraki switching across the clinics, wrote the migration procedure himself, and now leads the replacement of SD-WAN equipment at more than 14 sites. He also writes Python and Bash scripts that check device settings and network health before a problem reaches staff.
He started in finance, with close to eight years in financial services including Citigroup, so financial records are familiar ground. He then moved into technology roles at Glassdoor and 100Plus, and as an enterprise technical account manager at Splashtop he worked with corporate IT teams on firewall, VPN and single sign-on problems and trained their staff on secure remote access. He holds a project management certificate from Folsom Lake College, where he also studied computer science and Cisco networking.
Youn Kim
Youn Kim
Consultant · Software Development
Youn advises Stoner Advisory Group on the technology behind BondControls. He reviews the code that reads district records and matches them to the district's finance system, along with the tests that check the numbers before a report goes out.
He has built business software for more than 15 years. Today he leads software development at e4Hats.com, building the company's inventory system on Amazon Web Services. He moves work that staff used to do by hand into that system and builds the dashboards the company uses to track sales and decide what to buy.
Much of his work has been getting separate systems to agree. He connected online stores to company ERP systems for orders, shipments, returns and inventory, and as a freelance developer he built catalog and inventory software for e-commerce companies tied to Shopify and Amazon. At CuriosityStream and PhoneBurner he rewrote older code that could not be tested into well-tested modules, and at CuriosityStream he built the subscription billing connected to PayPal, Stripe and the Apple, Google, Amazon and Roku app stores. He holds bachelor's and master's degrees in electrical engineering from the University of California, San Diego.
04.1 Independence
We do not design. We do not build. And this is all we do.
Our focus is protecting the district's budget and offering operational guidance in the early planning stages of a capital bond program. We hold no stake in the architect's drawings or the construction manager's contracts, and we accept nothing from vendors. There is no corporate real estate arm here and no municipal division. Owner's representation is for Michigan school districts only, which is why the rules governing bond, millage, and sinking-fund dollars are second nature. Program financial controls, delivered remotely, are the one service we offer to districts in any state.
Talk through your bond program
A 30-minute conversation with our principal and partners: where your program stands and what an owner’s representative would do for it.