Background

How I got here.

Thirty years of the same work in different clothes. The short version is on the resume. This is the long one.

---

United States Marine Corps · 1992 to 1995

Three generations of my family were Marines before me. I did not plan on being the fourth. Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, and that changed my thinking. I enlisted in 1992 as a military policeman, my first real job after restaurants and roller skating rinks, and served until my honorable discharge in 1995. I was stationed at El Toro Marine Corps Air Station in California, where I worked gates, ran patrol, and spent time as a 911 dispatcher. That is where policing and a security mindset got built into me.

Motorola, later ON Semiconductor · eight years

After the Corps I spent eight years at Motorola, mostly at the 52nd Street and McDowell plant in Phoenix, which became ON Semiconductor partway through my time there. I moved up early and took the same path I had taken in the Marines, from the gates to patrol and then into the emergency management control center. From there I monitored and managed the response to security, fire, and life safety incidents across the facility. Semiconductor manufacturing runs on caustic chemicals and hazardous gases. I was given the opportunity to continue doing something that matters for real lives.

GoDaddy · 2004 to 2013

After more than a decade doing similar work for the government and then a large corporation, I landed somewhere different. I joined GoDaddy in 2004 as the third person in a brand new security department, behind the director and the supervisor. That is the job that turned me into an operations leader rather than only a security one. Promotions came quickly, and each one opened up something I had not done before. By the time I left I had run multiple departments and was the responsible party for a number of critical pieces of the business.

Metris · 2012 to 2014

While I was still at GoDaddy, a close friend I had worked with there left to join a startup defense contractor and asked if I wanted to help design and build a cleared facility able to house classified data. It was not something I could pass up. It required me to become a certified Facility Security Officer, and it let me design a security system starting at the construction phase and follow it all the way to completion and certification. Some of what we were doing had not been done in the defense industry at that point, specifically running classified and unclassified systems inside the same room. We were told it could not be done. The Metris team and I got it cleared and ended up with a joint operations center unlike anything else out there.

The rough stretch

Then sequestration hit. The defense industry seized up, our contract went away, and my position went with it. What followed was a rough stretch. I got my federal firearms license and started a business with one of the guys from Metris selling firearms and ammunition, which during that particular period was one of the few things moving.

I have had rough patches like anyone who has been at this long enough. I survived several rounds of layoffs at Motorola, got caught in one, and was brought back three months later. I saw what happened at ON Semiconductor once private equity was involved. I saw it again at GoDaddy after the 2011 investment, when Bob Parsons stepped back from the day to day and new leadership came in. It was clear that the people who had built the place were not going to be the ones running it. That is a large part of why I took the Metris opportunity when it came. Careers are not a straight line up, and I am not going to present mine as one.

YAM Properties · 2015 to 2016

The next call came from YAM Properties, a company Bob Parsons had started, which needed someone to stand up a facilities and construction management team while they acquired three hundred million dollars in commercial real estate spanning more than 350 tenants. I ran the security systems and energy management for all of those locations and managed the construction build outs for my locations, working with the construction companies on tenant improvement projects and tenant build outs. It did not last long, but I got to experience construction operations from a different perspective.

Stitch Fix · 2016 to 2022

Then someone I had worked for at GoDaddy for years brought me into another startup, Stitch Fix, to help run warehouse operations. I started in outbound and moved through every team in the building before landing as the operations manager over inbound for the women's and kids business lines, which meant the new product and returns teams for both, around three hundred people in total. That is where I picked up Lean Six Sigma and process improvement as a discipline instead of an instinct, and it stuck. Things I developed in the Phoenix warehouse were rolled out nationwide.

ForemostEV · 2022 to 2024

In 2022 I co-founded ForemostEV and we converted classic cars to electric. I ran the business end to end, the money, the vendors, the shop, the customers, and the builds, one of which was featured at SEMA. We sold it in 2024.

Edco · 2025 to present

Since January 2025 I have been the senior operations manager at Edco in Gilbert, running warehouse, production, purchasing, order entry, and HR.