I've been the only one who knew how the system worked.

I walked into an automotive consumer products retail distributor as a temp to reconcile nine back months of American Express statements. I didn't have a systems vision. I had rent due and a willingness to show up early.

Over the next fifteen years, I became the person who understood how the entire financial and operational infrastructure actually worked. Not because anyone planned it that way, but because the company kept growing and nobody else was asking the questions I was asking. Questions like: Why are we entering this data three times? Why doesn't this number match that number? Why is our month-end close a two-week archaeological dig?

So I started fixing things. I taught myself SQL at 30 because the reports we needed didn't exist and nobody was going to write them for us. I built Power BI dashboards that replaced the ritual of three people spending two days assembling a single financial view. I automated EDI processes for Walmart, Home Depot, Amazon, and AutoZone — which is its own kind of extreme sport. I migrated the company from QuickBooks to Dynamics GP, which is roughly the equivalent of performing an engine swap on a moving truck.

The Compound Effect of Showing Up

I didn't have a master plan. I had a compounding series of small decisions: learn this, fix that, build something better than the spreadsheet we've been duct-taping together. Over fifteen years, that compounds into something unusual — a person who understands accounting, IT, supply chain, EDI, SQL, ERP, and operational workflows not as separate disciplines, but as one interconnected system.

Most consultants specialize in one layer. I've lived in all of them. That's rare, and that's what I bring to the table.

The Hard Part

In June 2014, I got sober. That's not a footnote — it's central to the story. Everything I built, I built in recovery. Every system I designed, every close I ran, every automation I deployed was done by someone who had figured out that showing up and doing the right thing when nobody's watching is not a motivational poster — it's an operations strategy.

I don't preach about it. But I don't hide it, either. It's the foundation under the foundation.

What I'm Doing Now

I studied in the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business Executive CTO Program — formalizing the systems-thinking approach I've been running on instinct for a decade.

I'm building OpsLedger, a platform that connects operational events to financial truth in something approaching real time. Because the gap between "what happened" and "what the books say happened" is where manufacturing companies lose money they don't even know they're losing.

And I'm consulting — helping manufacturing and distribution companies modernize the systems that actually run their business. Not the flashy ones. The ones hiding behind four Excel files and a prayer.