Personal
The Long
Way Around
Small town in Pennsylvania, then the Navy, then twenty years under the hood of other people’s cars, then a support operation that was failing in public. Nobody plans a career like that. What connects it is a stubborn interest in how things actually function, and very little patience for pretending they do when they don’t.
Where I started
Lock Haven,
Pennsylvania
I grew up in Lock Haven, a small town on the West Branch of the Susquehanna in central Pennsylvania. It is the kind of place where you learn early that work is something you do because it needs doing, not because anyone is watching.
I joined the Navy at eighteen for three specific reasons: to learn a trade, to serve, and to build discipline and leadership. That was not a recruiter’s pitch I absorbed — it was what I actually wanted, and it is what I got. Five years later I came out with a technical specialty, an honorable discharge, and a standard for what “done properly” means that I have never really been able to lower since.
The Navy also decided where I would spend the rest of my life. I trained at Dam Neck, in Virginia Beach, on a fire control system fitted to frigates homeported here. Thirty years later I live in Carrollton, still within sight of the same water.
Hampton Roads is shaped almost entirely by the Navy — seven installations within an hour of my house and a shipyard that has been building warships since before the Civil War. It is a good place to be a veteran, and a good place to raise the expectation that things get done right.
The second act
From under the hood
to the help desk
I spent nearly twenty years as an automotive technician. ASE Master Technician, Chrysler Gold Certified, Ford and Kia certified — specializing in the work most people did not want: electrical faults, vehicle communication networks, and drivability problems that only appeared under conditions nobody could reproduce.
That is the part of the job that transferred. Diagnosing an intermittent electrical fault teaches you not to accept the first plausible explanation, not to replace parts until you understand the failure, and not to mistake a symptom for a cause. A support queue in trouble behaves exactly the same way. Everyone has a theory about why it is broken. Very few of those theories survive contact with the data.
By the time I moved into IT support I had already spent years leading a shop floor — routing work by skill level, training technicians, and being responsible for whether the team made its day. The industry changed. The job did not, as much as people assume.
The move was deliberate. I went back to school for a network administration degree while working full time, finished it in 2013 with a 3.59, and started over at the bottom of a new field in my forties.
Starting over is genuinely humbling, and I would recommend it to anyone. It puts you back in the seat of the person who does not know yet. I think about that constantly when I am coaching someone who is struggling — I remember precisely what it felt like to be the least experienced person in the room, and how much difference one patient colleague made.
- ASE Master Technician
- Chrysler Gold Certified
- Ford Certified
- Kia Certified
Finishing what I started
A bachelor’s degree,
thirty-one years later
I left the Navy in 1994. I finished my Bachelor of Arts in Business Administration in April 2025 — thirty-one years later, while working a full-time management job on a shift that ran to one in the morning and while leading a team of twelve.
It took three years and a 3.43 GPA. I am not going to pretend it was elegant. There were papers written at four in the morning and a lot of weekends that were not weekends.
I mention it because it is the single best answer I have to the question of whether I would ask my team to do something I would not do myself. I spend a lot of time telling people they are capable of more than they think. It is easier to say that credibly when you have recently proven it on yourself, at an age when most people have decided the door is closed.
It is not closed. That is most of what I want anyone who works for me to take away.
Away from the desk
Family, garage,
and a Golden Retriever
Time with family and friends, outdoors whenever the weather allows, weights in the gym, and whatever project the house has decided needs doing this month. Two wheels when there is road and daylight. And a Golden Retriever named Whiskey, who has strong opinions about how much of the day should be spent working.
On the wrenching
People ask why I still take my own bike apart when I could pay someone. Partly because I know how, and partly because I have never been comfortable owning a machine I do not understand.
It is the same instinct that has me building the reporting tools my team uses instead of waiting for someone else to prioritize them. If the thing needs doing and I can do it, I would rather just do it.
For the record
Pennsylvania raised,
Arizona adopted
Growing up in central Pennsylvania settles the sports question before you get a vote in it. Either Philadelphia, or Pittsburgh, top to bottom. This is how we were raised. I ended up with the Kelly Green and Scarlet Red of Philadelphia. I’ve clung to it ever since.
Philadelphia fans get written off as difficult. What actually gets demanded there is effort. You are forgiven for losing. You are not forgiven for not trying. I have never thought that was an unreasonable standard to hold anyone to.
The team I genuinely enjoy watching now is the Diamondbacks. They play with heart. They are rarely the roster anyone circles in March, and they compete anyway — through injuries, through bad stretches, through games that were already decided on paper.
They do not give up. That is the whole reason I watch. I have spent a long time around teams handed less than the competition and expected to deliver anyway, and I have real respect for anyone who keeps working after the scoreboard has stopped being encouraging.
Straight answers
Things worth knowing
before you hire me
I will tell you the bad number
The reports on this site name the year the operation failed, and by how much. I would rather hand a leader an uncomfortable figure early than a comfortable one late. If you want reporting that only reports wins, we will not enjoy working together.
I build the tool myself
When something my team needs does not exist and is not going to be prioritized, I tend to just build it — the leadership portal, the dashboards, the trackers. An FMLA tracker that accounts for the time accurately and reports on it. A timeclock auditing tool with real reporting behind it. Tooling that makes coaching mean something instead of being one more box to check. It is not always the right instinct, but nobody on my team has waited a quarter for a spreadsheet.
I am not precious about the work
I have swept a shop floor, worked overnight queues, and taken the escalation nobody wanted. Rank does not exempt anyone from the job, least of all the person in charge. That is a Navy habit and I have never seen a reason to unlearn it.