How I became a Small Business Consultant

In 1992, while attending the University of New Hampshire, I made the switch from biology to computer science and never looked back. Born into a blue-collared New England family of entrepreneurs, I grew up working for Aunts and Uncles in several family businesses. Business was always the conversation at holidays and other family gatherings and was pretty much just a way of life. By the time I was 18, I was managing people twice my age and responsible for significant revenue streams. After attending college, I took my formal education and what I learned in the family business and excelled over the following 15 years working as a system analyst, programmer analyst, data analyst and business analyst as a senior manager and executive. In 2014 I left corporate life and entered the local economy as an entrepreneur starting several small business and offering my expertise as small business technology consultant.

History

After school, I moved to Sarasota and entered my new career as a tech on a help desk for a large software and hardware engineering firm and from day one it was obvious I was different. Growing up in small businesses and working face to face with customers gave me a set of soft skills that were rarely found in IT guys.

I quickly climbed the ranks and ended up on the ERP team about the same time the company was sold. Once the deal was done and all the reorganization was complete, I went from working on a team of six in a single building to a team of 200 working all over the world. It was 2001, and I was responsible for the corporate website of a billion-dollar public corporation that was published in 7 core languages and a local presence in 48 countries. Everything we built we had to invent. There were no plug-ins, widgets or content management systems. We had to build it all from scratch.

Buy 2004, I found myself in the Natural Products industry working in a start-up atmosphere on a small development team supporting operations as a database developer. Over the next 10 years, I worked with the same core team while growing the company to over 75 employees and was directly responsible for launching several commercial multi-million-dollar online products. During these ten years, I got to work with executives and tech leaders from companies like GoDaddy, Dell, Intel, UNFI, Kehe, Cardinal Health, Pearson Education, The Fresh Market and Sprouts Farmers Market as well as hundreds of other small businesses in the United States and Canada.

In 2014, the BOD mandated a company move, and I just could not see myself leaving Sarasota. So, after months of deliberation decided to exit and start my own endeavor.

2014 – Present

Since October of 2014, I have worked with dozens clients helping them improve their businesses. At first my focus was in the IT space teaching them how to leverage current technologies and improve how they conducted day to day tasks through the use of technology.   However I quickly realized that my experience leading cross functional teams at the executive level was also something small businesses could benefit from and in some cases was more valuable than any of my technical knowledge. 

Now I consult on the entire operational and strategic health of an organization. Working directly with owners, CEO’s and other executives and I leverage leading edge business tools and teach businesses how to become laser focused by identifying or developing paths to success and how to best execute the tasks needed to reach their objectives.

I work with them to transform their staff into a high-performance workforce, improving teamwork, communications, goal setting, prioritization, how to measure real success and reach their objectives.  Businesses become agile, aligned and ready to handle anything the market may bring.  Businesses can reach goals faster and react to market changes with less effort, and less resources. We build lean mean business machines!

My process is  based on the same leveraged by Intel, Google and Amazon and is behind their ability to rapidly scale and change the world!  However, it can be scaled to meet any business at any size.

Personal

Working in a 24/7 career, I have learned to appreciate the moments outside of work. I try to spend most of my downtime with my family. My son is a competitive swimmer spending more than 20 hrs. a week at the pool and traveling the state for meets. He is also an honor roll student at Pine View School for the Gifted. So, he keeps my skills sharp when he needs help with differential equations, stoichiometry, or quantum mechanics. My wife Kelley of 25 years is a Enterprise Partner Lead in Partnerships & Alliances with Thomson Reuters working with Fortune 100 all over the world. She is also an avid runner, so if we are not at the pool you can probably find us at a 5K, half marathon, an endurance challenge or some crazy mud race. My personal passions are baseball and fishing. A perfect day for me is catching a gulf coast inshore slam by lunch then spending the afternoon poolside watching a game,  all with my wife, son and dog at my side.