Professional Profile

Walk me through your career as a story — where you started, the through-line, where you are now.

¶ I started my working career in foodservice and really enjoyed it. Working with people gave me a lot of energy, both coworkers and customers. I didn't feel like there was a great path that fit my skills as corporations with regional directors and significant career paths had a real problem with their standards vs reality (or what they would pay for) and I didn't feel like that was a fight I wanted to take on. I pivoted to accounting, decided I was much more interested in data analytics than being a CPA, and got a job at Chubb working in Internal Audit. Learned a lot specifically in Qlik, doing the typical Qlik data warehousing tasks, but ended up being stuck in the "slow and steady" corporate ladder. I took an opportunity at SDG in consulting and have been leading end-to-end data strategy and architecture ever since.

If you weren't in data and analytics, what would you be doing?

¶ Food service is the obvious one, but feels almost cheating. I want to start up fast casual, regional chain at some point. Love working with people. Outside of that I would probably go into some other type of engineering - product engineering. Something innovative and creative that solves problems.

Not the decision but the moment — was there a single thing that made you certain data was your field, or did it stack up gradually? If gradual, what was the last brick that locked it in?

¶ I honestly don't remember if there was a specific driver or subfield within D&A that was trendy at the time I considered. I think I always knew I was good with numbers and was pretty strong with excel and the "big data" moment was in full swing around the time I was pursuing my accounting degree. The moment was probably when I was going through that program and preparing for the heavy accounting tests in the end of the third year I believe. I knew pretty quickly CPA was not going to be the long term route as it felt more like government rules, requirements, and numbers being in the right spot was driving the work compared to having creativity and freedom to solve real problems. Obviously that's oversimplifying it, but it just felt too downstream from the real problems. I was actually extremely interested in "managerial" accounting at the moment. But I suppose really that was just a gateway to what the drive to data analytics was, which is using data to solve problems and drive decisions. I was calling it managerial accounting at the time, but that's probably the moment.

Of your career transitions, which felt riskiest at the time — what alternative did you walk away from, and what tipped it? And second: which one looks obvious in hindsight but was actually more deliberate than outsiders would assume?

¶ I generally feel like the riskiest decisions were when I wasn't pursuing something new when I know I probably should be.. but I think one answer is when I took an entry level position at chipotle in an attempt to climb that ladder. This was relatively early in their "public" phase and I still thought overall they had solid operations, but I could tell they were declining. At the time I felt strongly I wanted to find a chain like chipotle, climb the ladder, and impact operations at scale. I decided to get into the ground floor at chipotle and start that journey despite what I knew was going to be a year or so to climb to even an assistant manager position there, making significantly less money for a while than I could have been elsewhere. That is typical for the type of long term outlook and "bet on myself" decisions I am comfortable making.

¶ The transition from foodservice to accounting in general would answer your second question. To an outsider reading my resume it would seem that I just took my time in my early career and was using foodservice as a temporary income source until growing up and getting a real job. To those that know me, they know I was very passionate about food service and I really wanted to make that work long term, and was making calculated decisions on getting experience at a variety of restaurants operating in and around the fast casual space I was hoping to base my career in. I absolutely could have stayed on that career path, but there was just too much risk and uncertainty of never finding that fit that would reach that balance of truly enjoying my job and the compensation considering both elements had risk based on what I was experiencing industry realities were.

Who changed how you think about the work itself — your craft, not your worldview? If there's no single person, what's the closest thing — a composite, or a working pattern someone modeled that you took?

¶ I don't have one and I can't name a composite person here. I have always been learning from others through observation, but very much forging my own path in my work. I would say philosophy and economic understanding in general has shaped it more than anything. I understand the concept of a business is to provide value to the customer, and proposition of the employed to the employer is that the employer will gain more than they pay to the employee. I always try to respect those inherent agreements to the relationships. My job is partially to keep my supervisor happy with my performance, but there is a greater purpose to the company and ultimately I owe it to the company as a whole and ultimately the customers to do everything I can to maximize my value to the company and therefore the value proposition the company can provide to its customers. If that means pushing back against a status quo or risking a few people getting upset with me along the way... that's what I have to deal with to feel like I am holding up my end of the bargain. Obviously this has to be done respectfully.

Which job or project's fingerprints do you still see in how you work today — and where does that echo show up?

¶ One that sticks out would be one of the first items I had to handle at SDG. I pretty much only had Qlik experience at the time and we needed to create an endpoint to receive webhooks. It didn't seem that complicated, but this was before I could ask an LLM and no one in our immediate circle had handled it before. It was an extremely simple azure function that needed to be written, but it ended up taking me almost a week to get it working right. There were a couple weird blockers that I just couldn't track down or find the answer for and ended up writing an Azure ticket for help. They solved the problem essentially immediately with some environment variable that I didn't see in any of the many pages of azure function documentation.

¶ So two major lessons on this. One, use the help desk. Most of the time it's included and there are some weird things in the modern SaaS world that are basically impossible to find. You could write this more generally to just not waiting too long to ask for help from the experts. Second, just the J curve of learning something new and having the confidence to push through it. In retrospect it's extremely easy to do and could do it in an hour today, but at the time it felt very difficult. But that's natural and that's going to happen. With that experience maturing over time, and similar experiences since, my belief in being able to pick up almost anything fairly quickly by keeping my head down and working through the uncomfortable early stages is very high. Nothing scares me anymore.

Your best friend — someone who's seen you when no one's paying you to perform — what would they say describes you that a colleague would never quite get right? What's the thing they'd put first?

¶ I try to be as genuinely myself at work as possible so the answers are a bit boring and predictable. As most, I avoid some easily misinterpreted or colloquially volatile topics, so my best friends know more there. Even within that, I'm not afraid to tell people in an anarcho-capitalist and my philosophical adherence to the non aggression principle. Also as is common, I would say I am a bit more diplomatic at work while outside of work with those I'm comfortable with I feel more comfortable taking a strong position on something with maybe edgier back and forth. Compared to the norm in a work environment, I'm not sure the mental takeaway would be all that different though.

What's a skill or pattern you used to be measurably bad at — bad enough you knew it — that's now a strength or a non-issue? What changed, and roughly when?

¶ Going into SDG I had just educational and light experience w/ SQL, data warehouse, data lake, data ingestion. I was doing the "Qlik data warehouse" deal at Chubb, so all of that was handled via qlik scripting. So in the past 4 years there's quite a bit from a technical skill perspective as I feel like I have a really strong end to end base on now. From a pattern perspective as a manager I think the hardest thing is always getting comfortable seeing very little actual code for a solution you are responsible for, knowing there's probably quite a lot in there you would have done differently. Just trusting that you have to rely on requirements, testing criteria, quality gates, and the quality of vision to guide the end product. I don't think I would call this a strength yet, but certainly better at this than a couple years ago. I try to just ground myself in understanding where my value is and where I can have the most impact, reminding myself when I'm spending time on low value tasks.

What are you actively investing time in right now to get better at — not what you wish you were better at, but what you're actually putting attention into? And what gap are you closing with it?

¶ I would say I am actively trying to balance what my own opinion is for a product vs what the end consumer will want or notice. There's an element of over abstraction there. Just because I think about it and I would notice does not mean that most people would or wouldn't and it's worth our time as a development team. It's tough to "actively" work on but I am attempting to keep it as a top of mind thought. Don't scope the deliverable too specific to my own preferences. Another one I am somewhat actively working on I would call out here is developing code from the ground up to be AI friendly. How do we structure things with clean comments, architecture decisions, consistency to allow AI to best support the project... not just from a new code perspective, but also from a review and brainstorming perspective.

Which of your strengths is the same trait that causes you problems in the wrong context? What context flips it from asset to liability — and a concrete example where the instinct that usually wins lost you something?

¶ The most obvious one at the start are stakeholders that are hesitant to change and not used to the same level of first principles, don't care what we used to do, are we sure this actually provides business value mindset. I don't by any stretch think that the approach objectively gets the best results in all scenarios, so this isn't a jab saying these people are just incompetent or the like. But when I encounter them and I'm asking challenging questions it can come off a little bit "Let me tell you how to run your business / department / area that you are supposed to be the expert in and I just got familiar with", and in certain contexts that can certainly be a negative. If there isn't complete buy in you can quickly have IT and business on different agendas, and that's likely going to get a worse result than any direction both are aligned on. I don't want to butcher a specific example on the spot, but it's come up often enough where I didn't catch that gap quick enough and wasted a few sprints on work that never had a chance of being used.

Give me the longer, more textured "tell me about yourself" — the version with no time pressure, including the through-line.

¶ I am at heart a positive, optimistic, energetic extroverted person who gets energy by being around people and solving problems. Feels weird bringing it up sometimes, but hard not to talk about myself without my real ADHD-hyperfocus tendencies. I tend to, and also enjoy, taking a new problem or challenge or something to improve on and working at it until I find a solution or improve to a decent competency. Finishing those things takes focus but that's more or less me. Bounce around learning new things, helping people solve problems, taking the mission at hand seriously but also being myself and mixing in positive energy and awkward jokes that often are more confusing than funny.

Now the full walk-through — enough detail per stop to understand what you did and what you learned at each. Walk it foodservice → accounting → Chubb → SDG.

¶ Started working in foodservice when I was 14 with my father. Typical evolution of washing dishes and bussing tables. Onward to prep work and light line cook work - salads & desserts. I was a soccer kid growing up and mixed playing and coaching as I was graduating high school, so there was a few year period where I bounced around coaching, catering, cooking... many different roles.

¶ Was in and out of college for different directions for a while. Started thinking math + soccer coach. That didn't feel like so pivoted to early childhood education thinking maybe I could have an influence there and support important research. I didn't feel great about prospects of not banging my head against a wall for 30 years, so at some point I became more serious about foodservice and tried to make it more of a career while also getting accounting undergrad degree as a strong foundation underneath.

¶ I really enjoyed quick service and tried to find a company I could grow with and eventually be a significant factor in operations decisions for a large player. into my late 20s after more of a serious commitment than the other two paths I decided it just wasn't likely with how these chains were run. Very hard to even find a fit because there's so much corporate dishonesty and/or delusion.

¶ I decided late in my accounting degree that pivoting to something more data oriented with the accounting foundation was the way to go, and found a good opportunity, although at a paycut, to intern at Chubb. They liked me and it worked out there for a few years and really latched onto the role of improving their audit capabilities through data. How do you standardize data across dozens of departments into an audit framework? How do we give the operational auditors agile tools to run their audits efficiently? How do we test 100% of the population for audit risks, or make risk based selections for what to audit to increase the strength and confidence of our audit findings? Those were some of the common things and it was a great learning experience dealing with challenging data environment. It mostly ended up being end to end solution building, just all in qlik from extraction to presentation.

¶ At some point I could tell I was having a hard time finding ways to maximize my talents and the slow corporate growth stereotype was going to make it hard to stay there. I gave them a chance to provide a vision for career growth and opportunity, but ultimately decided to take a small risk and move to SDG for consulting work.

¶ That turned out great and immediately got on with a middle market growth client who needed to modernize their entire ecosystem for stability and scale in the cloud. Collision repair was the industry. I excelled and ended up building a ton of cool things and managing at one point 15+ consultants across a half dozen different projects (+ others in maintenance mode) across Azure, snowflake, dbt, qlik. I hit on just about every area... data science, gen AI, custom web portal, near live event based pipelines based on highly complicated nested xml, reverse ETL integration pipelines.... quite a bit. Was really fortunate to have that experience working side by side with the CIO attacking basically every area of the business with creative solutions. That ended recently but that pretty much brought me to now.

What's actually driving your results that would never make a resume bullet — the thing someone two months into working with you would say "oh, that's what makes him effective"?

¶ first thing that comes to mind is the stuff that studies generally say keeps people successful. Trait conscientiousness and raw intelligence. I would say I pair that with enough wisdom to have a bit of self humility... but not enough to lose confidence in my decisions when warranted. I think I just have the work ethic and internal drive to leverage my ability to quickly learn things to be effective in a wide array of situations. I listen to others when I feel it's right, but I trust my instincts when I feel it's warranted to forge my own path. It's not always going to be the "right" answer, but it's generally an approach that has worked for me.

What's the texture of an environment that lets you run — org shape, decision speed, team size, building vs. advising, in-office/remote? And the inverse: what kills your output even if everything else is fine?

¶ I always ask it on interviews I am giving. I think I would reiterate that there has to be some interaction. It doesn't have to be daily... I don't mind a day or two where I'm a bit isolated... but I need a good amount of weekly human interaction for my brain to stay grounded. I could adapt to quite a lot of environments other than that because as long as the people paying me think I am providing value, who am I to argue?

¶ That said, I don't believe I would be able to provide enough value in a setting where people aren't willing to be innovative, take risks, reconsider process from the ground up when needed. I would also say a high tension environment where every decision had to pass through layers of bureaucracy with over analyzed power points and casual communication was tough to come by. I think the perfect environment for me is where I can work underneath someone who is easy to talk to and communicates their vision clearly, giving me room to execute it once that initial trust has been established. Add on smart people that I can go to for advice on areas I may need a second thought on, even if just to avoid unnecessary over analysis of a problem. When you are the only one capable of solving a problem it's pretty easy to try to vet every path yourself. For me especially I think that's a waste of my time and potential.

¶ Articulate the vision and be available, clarify communication instead of asking for perfect communication every time, be open to out of the box sometimes crazy ideas, and give me a couple people to bounce ideas off of. In that environment you will get a ton of value from me.

How does a manager operate with you that works — 1:1s, decision involvement, feedback patterns, hands-on vs hands-off?

¶ I will repeat that I can adapt to quite a lot. As someone under a manager, I try to respect what that manager wants and let my own personal preference not be overridden by theirs completely, but incorporate their opinions and preferences as significant inputs. I also try to understand what their boss is after as well and add that as inputs. And I have no problem with this - I think this is normal and what I would want and have wanted in that position. Think for yourself but remember the vision and key points and what I might challenge you on.

¶ That said, a manager relationship that likely is the best fit has to have an open mind and okay with someone who can sometimes "overthink" things with alternative solutions and deeper thought than maybe is appropriate. I'm going to bring up ideas that you will have to shoot down as unrealistic. Maybe even most of them. I will absolutely go on some tangents and rants and rabbit holes that potentially are deeper than the ideal solution warrants. But hopefully that also surfaces some genuinely impactful and worth the effort. But my ideal manager would be able to know when to feed into that and when to give the feedback to route that energy somewhere else.

¶ I'm pretty open to the rest of it I think. If they want to "micro manage" some things or most things... that is fine with me. I will give the feedback where I think that adds friction and hurts value, and as long as they still think it's appropriate - I'm going to trust the process. The more feedback the better... there's no need to censor feedback for me - I'm basically impossible to offend.

In 3-5 years, not a title but a shape — what problems are you solving, who with, what scope, what does the week look like? Bonus: a trajectory you'd refuse even at the right money.

¶ 3 to 5 years I'd like to be in a position somewhere that I feel like I'm having enough impact on the company or real human lives to make it really hard to leave to start my own fast casual chain. I'm a part of a team, or leading a team, that works well together, feels efficient and effective, and working on something of real value. That could be a product that has a wide reach that I am helping shape or could be part of a company that I believe firmly is providing society a valuable service. There are other alternatives I could see myself being happy with to, but it comes down to does my work + life balance provide enough opportunity to feel like I'm not wasting my talents and abilities on something overall insignificant?

¶ The example I give a lot is how much human capital I feel is wasted on financial analytics. I'm way oversimplifying it and I know it's more nuanced than this, but overall the amount of human capital spent on monthly reports, quarterly targets, and moving numbers around just to make a board deck or public release sound a little bit better, regardless of the realities of the business health underneath, is just not something that would keep me engaged for very long. I get the necessity of it and I can find some motivation in incremental improvements... but eventually I have to ground myself in more tangible real world value generation.

Dream role, constraints lifted — specific industry, role, and working day. If you got it tomorrow with no career-path or logistics concerns, what would it look like? Fast-casual side welcome too.

¶ Outside of building to and running hundreds to thousands of restaurants, delivering a service that I think is incredibly valuable to millions of families... I would say being on a tight knit, smart, effective team for a company that is providing real impact to the world. If I was helping lead a team of 3-5 talented and passionate developers that were empowered to execute at the high level by a few really talented people above me I could lean on when needed... that would be the dream role. I would add on my specific role in that is probably working closely with business stakeholders and executives to drive the vision and roadmap of what should get built. What is going to move the needle. What do we really need from a data perspective to take a certain business function to the next level or deliver a significantly improved experience to our employees or customers? Something in that vein would be great.

The pitch, not the list — assume the other resume has the same companies, tools, tenure, and depth. What makes the next thing different when you do it versus them?

¶ I think there is some value in the quality and depth and forward thinking I bring to solutions. I don't just solve for the immediate need, I plan ahead and try to write my code to work with what's coming next. That can be a negative if you don't have clean business understanding and internal alignment as it may add a little more upfront work, but generally it has paid pretty significant dividends for me. That said, I don't think that's the differentiator. To me the biggest differentiator would almost certainly be the pace at which I pick up how my role and my department can truly bring value to the business, and the suggestions for what to build and how to build it, not necessarily the execution quality or speed of the thing being built. I would say it's likely there is a near 100% chance the next thing will be the next thing with the other candidate. With me maybe the next thing is the next thing, but it's not nearly as certain, and the next thing after the next thing is in great peril. I think it's not that uncommon for people to attempt to contribute in this area... I think the speed at which my ideas are genuinely accepted and influencing direction is much higher than is generally the case.

What do you actually ask interviewers — the top 3-5 you reach for, and what each one is screening for on the other side?

¶ I definitely don't have a bank to pull from. I usually have enough questions ahead of time to clarify the role or work environment, or things that come up in the interview. I ask the work-env Q to people that I am interviewing - as the interviewer not the applicant. I like to be very comfortable with the role I am accepting to ensure there isn't a grenade that I know will just not be a fit. So anything that speaks to what they are looking for from an employee in that role and what they Aren't looking for I would ask. What a day or week looks like if that's not clear. What would they expect people typically struggle with. If they have anything in the description I don't know I like to ask something to gauge if I see that being an issue or not.