I think in systems.
I have a degree in Management Science with an emphasis in Quantitative Methods. I spent years implementing statistical process control on manufacturing lines. Measuring, adjusting, improving. I built automation systems for micro-wire production used in aerospace electronics. I developed measurement algorithms that are still used in industrial lasers.
Here's what that taught me: when you can see a system clearly, you can fix almost anything.
Most business owners can't see their system. They're pushing and hoping. Not because they're not capable, but because nobody showed them how to look. That's what I teach.
Management Science, Quantitative Methods
The analytical foundation behind everything I build
Statistical Process Control
Manufacturing lines, aerospace micro-wire, industrial lasers
25 Years Building Systems
Custom software for nonprofits and small businesses
Theory of Constraints
Goldratt's framework, adapted for the self-employed
I built things. I lost things.
The framework didn't come from a textbook. It came from twenty-five years of getting it wrong before I got it right.
Process Engineering Consulting
With my wife, a polymer engineer. Good work. Meaningful work. A real partnership.
Forced to close by a health crisis
External forces can destroy things you build, no matter how good they are.
E-commerce business, from scratch
We rebuilt. It grew. Then we lost it in a legal fight with a corporation that had deeper pockets. Gone.
$27 million to acquire two manufacturing companies
The deal failed. Internal politics, a union strike, and circumstances nobody could have predicted. September 11th happened. A month later I lost my father. I fell apart.
Custom software for nonprofits and small businesses
I figured out how to work thirty hours a week and still maintain the business and the life. I had the system.
But I didn't stop at thirty hours.
I chased the next big thing. I worked sixteen-hour days when six hours of focused work would have kept the same lifestyle. The business wasn't consuming my life. My ego was. And I couldn't see the difference.
The lesson that changed everything.
I had the system. I had the framework. I knew how to build a business that ran on thirty hours a week.
But I didn't hold the boundary. I chased revenue past the point where it mattered. I let the ego drive when the system was already working.
That was the lesson I didn't want to learn: align the business to support your life, not your life to support your business.
I streamlined the business. I jettisoned the ego projects. I set a boundary, and this time I held it.
What I do now.
I still build custom business systems. But I also help self-employed business owners see their businesses clearly. Not through theory. Through the framework I built from twenty-five years of learning the hard way that the most important metric is whether the person running it has a life worth living.
The system works. I use it myself, every week, at my own kitchen table. The boundary holds. The business serves the life. Not the other way around.