Somewhere between strategy and making.

I've built teams, practices, products, and businesses across financial services, technology, and consulting. The common thread isn't an industry. It's usually a moment when an organization knows it needs to change and hasn't yet figured out how.

I started in pre-med, transferred to art school, and have been making things professionally ever since: identity systems, campaigns, products, platforms, research programs, teams. The range is not an accident. Being able to move between a positioning conversation and a prototype in the same afternoon is most of what makes me useful.

Some of it has been at a large scale, inside banks and global consultancies. Some of it has been at forty people, where one decision moves everything. I started my own firm in 2010 and won work from the Carlyle Group, ProFunds, the Mortgage Bankers Association, and Reed Business Information, with nobody behind me. At Nimbl I helped build and grow the UX and service design capability, and later helped shape the firm's AI practice and adoption strategy.

I'm most useful before anyone is sure what the problem is. The first job is usually figuring out what we're actually solving, who for, and what has to be true before anything gets built. That part is research, though I'd rather not dress it up: it's just refusing to guess when you could find out.

After that it's a fairly consistent arc. See what should exist. Design it well enough that people can react to something real. Get everyone who has to say yes pointed the same direction. Build it. Then do the unglamorous work of making sure it outlives the enthusiasm that started it.

Research that doesn't change a decision is expensive theater, so I scope it backward from the decision it has to inform. I'd rather ship something smaller that survives than design something larger that dies in review. And I've learned to be suspicious of my own good ideas until someone who has to live with them has pushed back hard.

The other half of the job is people. I've hired, taught, and promoted a lot of designers and researchers, and watching someone become better than I was at their age is the part I'd miss most if it went away. I coach outside of work too, which is the same instinct with worse weather.

I'm a father. I love to cook, make music, remodel things that did not ask to be remodeled, and read more history than is strictly necessary.

Music has always been both a creative outlet and a way to reset. I still play ice hockey, work out, and generally prefer being active to sitting still. Give me a sunny day outside, especially somewhere on or near the water, and I'm in a pretty good place.

I've always liked making things. Food, music, spaces, experiences, sometimes businesses. There's something satisfying about starting with an idea and slowly turning it into something real.

I have never once managed to leave a broken thing alone. My family will confirm this, at length, without being asked.