Better tools changed how fast the work moves. They have not changed who decides. Every gate in the system I run today has a person standing at it, and the gates that matter most are conversations.
Express WritersPresident & Owner2021 – present
Bought the company in 2021 and spent the years since rebuilding how it runs. EOS first: weekly leadership meetings, scorecards, an accountability chart that matched the work rather than the title on it.
Then the operating system in the field report. AI carries production inside governed permissions, every deliverable is verified live before it counts, and nothing goes outbound without a person sending it. Ninety-one deliverables shipped through it in one recent six-week window, zero reverts.
One capability we built for ourselves turned into a service line: AI-visibility analytics, measuring how AI assistants cite and recommend a brand. Clients were asking the question before the tooling existed to answer it.
AltSource2009 – 2021Portland, Oregon
Hired to organize a five-person development team. Left twelve years later with the company past two hundred people and annual revenue up from $500K to $30M.
The work under that number was mostly unglamorous and mostly about people. I built the client services model, so delivery stopped depending on who happened to answer the phone. I built the recruiting engine, because in a software services business the hiring rate is the growth rate. We opened offices in Ashland, Austin, and Jacksonville, then stood up the company's first international office in Vietnam, including the legal entity and the investment incentive negotiations that went with it.
Management systems came along with the scale. EOS across the company, weekly leadership meetings to clear bottlenecks before they cost a quarter, OKRs rolled out to a two-hundred-person organization.
Managing Partner 2018 – 2021 · Director of Operations 2010 – 2017 · Project Manager 2009 – 2010
Before that
Marketing Director, Portland Bolt & Manufacturing. 2005 – 2009. Web strategy, direct mail, email, print, and PR for a manufacturer selling into construction. Where I first owned pricing.
Business Development, WSCO Corp. 2004 – 2005. New business, client consultations, and the first opportunity-tracking system the company had.
Language Instructor, Nova Group, Japan. 2003 – 2004. Taught English, trained new instructors, ran scheduling. A year and a half of explaining things to people who did not share my assumptions, which turned out to be most of the job ever since.
Inside Sales & Marketing, Portland Bolt & Manufacturing. 2001 – 2003. First job out of school. Customer service and estimating.
Education
Oregon State University. BS, Business and Communications.
Certified Scrum Product Owner and Certified ScrumMaster, Scrum Alliance.
Contact
I am most interested now in what happens when an operating company gets serious about AI and keeps its judgment where it belongs.