About
I build companies the way I build software.
End to end.
Most operators are specialists who learned to manage adjacent disciplines. I am the opposite. I am a generalist who learned each discipline from the inside — and I run them as one integrated practice. It is also how I serve a board: as an operator who has carried the P&L, structured the capital, and shipped the product — not an observer.
01 — The Arc
Twenty years across one question.
I have spent two decades asking a single question in different industries: what does it take to build a company where the product, the operation, and the capital structure all work as one thing?
The early answer was: build the product. I founded Forge in 2002 as a custom software studio, ran it for twelve years, and shipped SaaS, eCommerce, and CRM platforms for more than 200 small and mid-sized businesses. That work taught me how products are made — not by managing engineers, but by being one. I have not stopped writing code since.
The second answer was: turn around the operation. Henry Schein after eight years of stagnation. Bright MLS after a merger and two years of paralysis. AuthenticID with 90% technical debt and Fortune 100 customers losing patience. Ford EMEA and India running on a sixty-hour week and no delivery predictability. The patterns are different in each case; the discipline of seeing the system clearly and acting on it is the same. I delivered $14M in net new recurring revenue at Henry Schein, an 85% defect reduction at AuthenticID, a 71% technical debt cut at Ford, and an 8% EBITDA lift across three merged healthcare MSPs at Sunset.
The third answer — the one I am working on now — is: structure the capital so the product and the operation can compound. That means QSBS-eligible entities from day one. ITC/PTC transferability built into the project finance from the start. Multi-entity stacks designed for the exit math before the first customer signs. It means knowing what § 1045 does and when to use it. Boards and founders usually outsource this work to attorneys and CFOs who optimize one variable at a time. I run all three variables together — product, operation, capital — because that is the only way the math actually closes.
Today I am running all three at once — building again, hands-on. Most recently that is Shield One AI, where I am building Raptor, a cross-platform RMM platform for managed-service providers — and writing the essays I wish existed about the work.
02 — How I Operate
Six principles I do not negotiate.
Build the product yourself, then hire to scale it.
Outsourcing the build at the beginning is how founders lose conviction about what they are actually selling. The agent I built exists because I wrote it, and I wrote it because no one else could have understood the operator's problem deeply enough to encode it correctly. Hire engineers when the architecture is settled and the scaling problem is the bottleneck — not before.
Quantify the technical debt as a P&L line item.
Every company I have ever turned around had technical debt no one had priced. Once you put a dollar number on it — engineering hours diverted, defects per quarter, delivery latency penalty, customer churn attribution — the work becomes ordinary capital allocation. 85% defect reduction at AuthenticID was not a heroic engineering effort. It was a decision to treat the problem as math.
Capital structure precedes product strategy.
The entity stack, the tax treatment, and the investor terms set the boundary conditions for every subsequent decision. A company that is structurally inefficient — wrong entity type, wrong jurisdiction, wrong cap table — will compound those inefficiencies forever. I structure first, then build inside the structure.
Govern from the side of the investor.
I govern the companies I have founded — the largest economic stakeholder in each — and I read board materials the way an LP would, not the way a manager would. This means: KPI dashboards that mean something, investor reporting that anticipates the question, and an unwillingness to confuse activity with progress. It is the discipline I would bring to an outside board.
Decide fast, document slow.
My DISC profile reads as a Dominant-Inspiring style and my MBTI as a Commander. The strengths are decisiveness, energy, and pattern recognition. The discipline I have had to build is the patience to document why a decision was made so the organization can learn from it. Decisions are cheap; institutional learning is expensive.
Pick the long game, then sprint within it.
The companies I have founded or chaired are five-to-ten-year plays. The work I do inside them, day to day, is sprint work — small horizons, fast cycles, decisive moves. Most operators get this backwards: they think strategically about the day and tactically about the decade. I do the opposite.
03 — Leadership Profile
What it is like to work with me.
Three assessments point the same direction, which is the only reason I cite them. My CliftonStrengths top five are Strategic, Positivity, Ideation, Developer, and Belief — and five of my top ten sit in the Strategic Thinking domain. DISC reads Dominant-Inspiring; 16Personalities calls it Commander. In plain terms: I think in strategy and possibility, I decide quickly, and I bring people with me rather than over them.
One number tells you more than the labels do. Of my thirty-four strengths, Command ranks twenty-fifth — near the bottom. My authority has never come from dominance; it comes from strategy, conviction, and the better argument. I would rather win a room with the right idea than the loudest voice — and Belief, my fifth theme, means I won't push an idea I don't actually hold.
In practice that looks like Ideation and Futuristic running ahead to the version of the business that should exist, Analytical and Learner pressure-testing it, and Developer pulling the team up to build it. The work I've had to do on myself lives in the shadows those same strengths cast: slowing down so the room is genuinely aligned and not merely deferring, not applying my own intensity to every problem, and accepting that institutional learning is slower than my own.
People who work well with me share three traits: a clear point of view, a preference for outcomes over process, and the ability to take a strong note without taking it personally. People who don't tend to want more procedural air than I'm inclined to provide. I tell you this plainly because a board, a founder, or an investor deserves to know it before the engagement letter, not after.
04 — Boards & Affiliations
Where I serve, and for whom.
I govern the companies I have founded and am pursuing select outside board-director and operating-partner roles, by referral.
Board Candidacy
- Pursuing select outside board-director roles
- Operator judgment, capital fluency, regulated-industry depth
- Energy · financial services · healthcare · public safety
Current Executive Roles
- Founder & CEO · Shield One AI
- Chief Product Officer · IREX.AI
05 — Credentials
Education, certifications, and compliance fluency.
Education
- Chief Product Officer Certification · MIT Sloan School of Management
- Bachelor of Science, Information Technology · University of Phoenix
Professional Certifications
- Lean Six Sigma Black Belt · Brigham Young University
- SAFe Product Owner / Product Manager (POPM) · Scaled Agile
Compliance & Regulatory Fluency
SOC 2 · NERC CIP · GDPR · PCI · HIPAA · FCRA
06 — Personal
Outside the work.
I live in Midway, Utah, at the edge of the Wasatch Range. I read more than I write, write more than I publish, and publish only what I am willing to defend in person. I am most useful to a board, a founder, or an investor when the conversation moves fast and the stakes are real. The rest of the time I am happy to be quiet.