A Docent is a guide — someone who knows the terrain and walks alongside you, without owning the collection and without anything to sell. That is the role, and it is why the firm is named for it.
Henry has sat in every seat in this relationship — the employer hiring the advisor, the firm being hired, and the organization negotiating with both. As founder of Docent, he helps leadership teams choose an advisor using Strategic Fit rather than an RFP scorecard, reset relationships that have drifted without defaulting to a search, and steward the ones that are working so they don't quietly become average.
His career has moved back and forth across that table. On the advisory side, he has held senior leadership roles at Willis Towers Watson, Aon, and KPMG. On the employer side, he was Director of Health Care Programs at Cooper Industries, where he was the one hiring and managing the advisors, and he served in finance and administration roles at MD Anderson Cancer Center, where he built the function that negotiated with insurers and networks for the first time. That range is why he reads an advisor's incentives accurately, and why he can be trusted in a room with both a client and their incumbent firm. His work centers on helping HR, Finance, and Procurement leaders navigate high-stakes decisions with steadiness and transparency — including the conversations about cost that most processes leave until the end.
Henry is a graduate of Sam Houston State University and earned the Global Professional in Human Resources (GPHR) certification. He serves as Board Chair of Gulf Coast Blood, one of the largest community blood centers in the United States, supplying 170 hospitals and healthcare facilities across 26 counties — including the Texas Medical Center — and supporting scientific research through donor contributions. He has also held nonprofit leadership roles with the National MS Society and the Houston Golf Association / First Tee of Greater Houston.
Henry Noey | Managing Principal
Catherine O’Neill | Senior Advisor
Catherine has seen a wide cross-section of consulting and brokerage firms up close — their people, their approaches, and how differently they treat the same client problem. At Docent she leads Strategic Fit preparation, renewal readiness, and relationship reset work, helping leadership teams say what they actually need before the conversation gets formal.
Prior to joining Docent, Catherine held senior roles at Included Health and Willis Towers Watson. At Included Health she was responsible for the firm's consultant and broker relationships, a role that put her in regular contact with advisory organizations across the market and gave her an unusually direct view of how they are staffed, how their talent varies, and how much of what a client experiences depends on which team they happen to be assigned. At Willis Towers Watson she led large-employer relationships and strategic partnership initiatives across complex, multi-stakeholder environments.
That combination is what makes her useful when a client and an advisor are describing the same relationship in two different ways. She knows what an account team can and cannot escalate internally, where the constraint is the firm and where it is the individual, and how a relationship begins to drift long before anyone names it as a problem.
Catherine holds a Bachelor's degree from Villanova University.
Melissa keeps a Docent engagement moving — across the client, the advisor and broker firms involved, and our own team. Even a well-run project touches several organizations at once, each on its own calendar. Melissa is the reason the steps stay in sequence and nothing quietly stalls.
At Docent she supports Strategic Fit preparation, coordinates the parties as a project progresses, and manages the materials and follow-through that keep each stage on track. Her work makes sure everyone involved knows what is being asked of them, by when, and what comes next.
Before joining Docent, Melissa led large-scale organizational change initiatives at Halliburton and KBR, including a global ERP transformation affecting more than 30,000 employees. That work required coordinating across functions, geographies, and vendors simultaneously, and it built the discipline she brings to Docent engagements.
Melissa is a graduate of Texas A&M University, where she earned a degree in Information and Operations Management with an emphasis in Management Information Systems and Supply Chain.