About
I'm an operator. I take service businesses that have outgrown the way they're run and rebuild them from the product outward.
The short version
I'm the General Manager of Adventure Idaho, a multi-site outdoor recreation company operating on federal and state permits in Idaho. I run operations, marketing, and sales, I lead a seasonal team of 45, and I built the software the company runs on: 696 commits and 566 production deployments across two repositories, most of them shipped mid-season while the operation was live.
How I got here
At 22 I bought a locksmith business in Rexburg, Idaho. It was doing a few hundred dollars a month. I expanded the services, fixed the pricing, and built a crew that could cover calls around the clock, and revenue grew about six times over before I sold it. It was a very small business and I would never call it an exit. But I found it, bought it, ran it, and sold it, and it taught me more about pricing and staffing than anything since.
In between I sold door to door, which is the fastest education in rejection and conversion available anywhere, and spent about a year at a roughly $40M company working on international distribution and sales operations. I also spent a couple of seasons guiding multi-day wilderness trips on the Middle Fork of the Salmon for a different outfitter.
What I believe about operations
Fix the invisible leaks first. The money a business is losing quietly is almost always larger and easier to recover than the money it could win with a new initiative.
Build the system instead of repeating the work. The second time I do something by hand is the signal it should be a checklist, a template, or software, so the third time it runs without me.
Get the owner out of the critical path. A business that only works when one person remembers everything isn't a business yet, it's a job with employees.
Make it visible. You can't manage or improve what nobody can see.
Other things
I'm an FAA-certificated private pilot, which is relevant mostly because aviation runs on checklists and my first move at Adventure Idaho was writing them. I'm an Eagle Scout, I hold an Idaho guide license, and I'm involved with the surf wave project in Twin Falls. I spent two years doing full-time volunteer service in Southern California.