My Story
I started in supply chain. Demand planning, inventory management, getting the right product to the right place at the right time. A decade of it. The work was about systems — figuring out what needs to move, what's blocking it, and building the infrastructure to make it flow.
Then I took over a 120-year-old opera house.
The Matthews Opera House & Arts Center in Spearfish, South Dakota. Three staff. No departments. No middle management. Every operational challenge — volunteer coordination, donor management, event logistics, grant writing, board packets, marketing — landed on one desk.
So I built. Not off-the-shelf solutions — nothing on the shelf fits a 3-person team running 200+ events a year. Real systems, designed for how we actually work. Automated volunteer coordination from 6 hours a week to 45 minutes. Replaced 4-hour manual board packet assembly with one-click generation. Created event pipelines that push to five platforms from a single entry.
The volunteer scheduling bottleneck looked exactly like a supply chain decoupling point. The donor lifecycle was an inventory management problem. Event logistics was demand planning with different nouns.
Patterns travel across domains. The more domains you work in, the more you see the structural problems underneath. Most consultants go deep in one area. I went wide — and it turns out that's a weapon.
I also write songs. Americana, folk, country. Founded Queen City Songwriters Inc. to build a community around it. Writing within tight structural constraints taught me more about designing systems than any business book. The through-line between a well-built song and a well-built workflow is more real than you'd expect.
Now I do the same for other organizations. I call the practice Groundwork — because the work that matters is always underneath. I map what's actually happening, redesign the system, and when you need custom tools, I build those too. Everything I deliver exists because I needed it first — built from operational proof, not market research.