Skills
OPERATIONS & ORGANIZATIONAL LEADERSHIP
• Running multi-department organizations — led 16 departments and 260 people as COO.
• Organizational restructuring and workforce planning under pressure, using performance and cost data.
• Building operating cadence: meeting rhythm, accountability structures, and cross-functional follow-through.
• Change management — moving organizations from informal, paper-based processes to structured, data-informed operating models.
• Turnaround and unit-economics repair, converting underperforming functions into profit centers.
PERFORMANCE SYSTEMS, DATA & PROCESS
• KPI framework design across production, efficiency, and departmental performance.
• Dashboard and reporting build-out that gives leadership real operational visibility.
• Process optimization (Lean / Six Sigma) — identifying inefficiency and reducing quantifiable waste.
• ERP implementation and adoption (Oracle NetSuite), including full paper-to-digital transition.
• Operational analytics and data-driven decision-making.
REGULATORY & COMPLIANCE
• Federal compliance ownership as a named responsible person on a Federal Firearms License (FFL).
• ATF regulatory compliance, audit readiness, and documentation discipline.
• Operating a business under a high-consequence regulatory regime.
SERVICE OPERATIONS & TECHNICAL
• Hands-on commercial coffee and espresso equipment troubleshooting and repair.
• Field service management — technician deployment, response-time and reliability optimization.
• Service-partner network performance management (100+ partners; First Time Fix Rate improvement).
• Aftersales and service leadership across the U.S. and Canada.
TRAINING & PEOPLE DEVELOPMENT
• Technical training and curriculum design, including hands-on troubleshooting methods and competency programs.
• Train-the-trainer model design — scaling training reach without adding headcount.
• Developing managers (Regional Service Managers) and frontline technical teams.
• Leadership coaching.
BUSINESS BUILDING & GO-TO-MARKET
• Founding and standing up a company end-to-end — brand, website, contracts, and service offerings.
• Service design, productization, and offer and pricing structuring.
• Business advisory and operations-audit methodology for founder-led and family-owned firms.
• Strategic planning and business and financial modeling (BOM, margin, pro-forma).
• Sales and business development, including cold and referral-partner outreach.
• Content and LinkedIn strategy, plus brand and document design systems.
• AI integration into operational workflows.
DISTINCTIVE
• Performance and track driving; automotive and motorsport fluency.
• Industry-body leadership — founding member, Specialty Coffee Association Coffee Technician Guild.
About
I started with my hands. Before the title was COO, before there was a firm with my philosophy stamped on it, I was a service tech with my hands inside an espresso machine, figuring out why it wouldn’t run and making it run. That’s not a footnote — it’s the whole grammar of how I work. Everything I’ve built since is the same move at a larger scale: walk into something that isn’t working, see what other people have stopped seeing, fix the thing nobody else wants to touch, and leave it better than I found it. I put that on a company eventually. But I was living it for fifteen years before I ever wrote it down.
The path looks like a deliberate climb, but mostly I was just following the work. At Kaldi’s I turned a service department from a cost center into something that actually made money, and trained techs by deliberately sabotaging machines so they’d learn to troubleshoot under real pressure. At Franke I took a two-person training group and rebuilt it to reach an entire continent without adding a single head. At Wilson Combat I ran 260 people across 16 departments, carried a federal firearms license with my own name on it, and led the company through a hard COVID restructuring. I did it with data and as steady a hand as I could manage, and I won’t pretend it was easy. That kind of weight never shows up in a resume bullet. I carried it anyway.
Then I did the thing that took more nerve than any of it. I left a stable executive seat — five years in — to build TrueNorth from nothing: the website, the brand, the contracts, the offerings, the entire apparatus, from zero. And I haven’t stopped building since. I can’t look at a half-formed idea and leave it alone, and I’ve stopped calling that restlessness — it’s just how I’m built.
I’d rather be told the truth than be comforted. I want the candid read before I commit to anything, every single time. I notice hollow phrasing and I call it out. I want real pushback when the reasoning is sound, and I don’t need much hand-holding to find the next step — I’m usually already standing on it. I think that’s rarer than it should be. Most people say they want honesty and then flinch when it arrives. I actually want it, because I make real decisions with real consequences, and I’ve learned that flattery doesn’t survive contact with reality.
So, plainly: I’m a builder and a fixer who came up through his hands, who tells the truth and expects it back, and who stayed loyal to the people and the place that made him. That line I wrote was never really about consulting. It’s just how I move through the world.
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