I grew up on a production line.
Not a metaphor.
My dad was the Master Electrician at Miracle Recreation — responsible for setting up their warehouses and production lines, little bits of the whole factory spread across the heartland. I'd walk that floor with him, watching the sequence. How one step had to happen before the next. How the whole thing only worked if the order was right.
But I wasn't just visiting. I was one of their models.
They'd pull me from class, or from daycare, and bring me to this secret park set up behind the factory — new equipment arranged for display and showcasing. I got to "play" on it while they made pictures. One year I was on the cover of their catalog.
Later, I had one of my first jobs there too. Stuffing envelopes with the other staff kids. I was fast. Earned a watch and two hundred dollars.
I loved the name. The smell of fiberglass. The rhythm of the line.
And watching the whole process — seeing something emerge from pieces — that's where I learned how projects work. There's a time that something takes. And there's a time it takes when it's working optimally.
I saw that.
At home, I was the kid taking apart console TVs and radios — anything electronic, anything that could be opened and understood. I needed to see how things worked.
I still do.
The Pattern
That curiosity turned into a career of walking into complex situations and finding what was ready to shift.
At Cloud 9, I was brought in after previous launch attempts had floundered. When investors asked what I'd do with double the money, I didn't give them a strategy deck. I said, "Make more product." We launched.
At Disney, I was handed a failing project — 101 Dalmatians ASB — behind and over budget. I found the sequence that was creating drag, rebuilt it, and delivered on time. It won awards.
At CarsDirect, Bill Gross and Scott Painter pulled me in to salvage a disaster. The big auditing firms were doing their discovery, but I'd already mapped it: every human interaction was a chance to lose the customer. The elegant truth was subtraction, not addition.
I learned to see what others were too close to notice.
The Roof
But the Tesla story shows how I actually work.
I didn't come in as an executive. I came in at the bottom. Laborer. Trained in roofing. Installing solar panels in the California heat.
Why? Because I wanted to see the real operation. Not the version that gets presented upstairs. The actual work. The actual friction. Where time was really going.
What I found was a system that took three months to install a single home.
Three months.
Within a year and a half, we had a redecked home installed in one day.
That wasn't about working faster. It was about reordering the sequence. Decisions made upfront instead of discovered downstream. Parallel instead of serial.
I call it leadership from the bottom. You'd be surprised what you can see when you're willing to get on the roof.
The Lesson
I've also learned what happens when you're not in the right seat.
At PartsAmerica, we'd just closed a $30 million round from CSK Auto and Advance Auto Parts. I delivered their first same-day fulfillment — order online, get it delivered that day. We had what looked like a winning hand.
But the structure of the deal created constraints that only became clear once we were deep in. The path to success for the business and the path the deal required weren't the same path.
I helped the team arrive at the gut-wrenching decision to return $24 million to investors and walk away.
I wasn't in the position I needed to change the outcome.
That one taught me something I've never forgotten: seeing the answer isn't enough. You have to be in a position to actually move the pieces.
That's why I'm thoughtful about how I engage now. Not advising from the side. In the work. With the access to actually change things.
What I Believe
Most leaders see half the picture. They're either up in strategy or down in the weeds — rarely both at once.
I see both.
I can do forensics in the details before a company's even launched, and I can sit with investors and tell them what the macro actually means.
And I tell the truth about what I find. Good news, bad news — facts drive strategy. Not the other way around.
What I Build
Systems that work when I'm not in the room.
That's the test. If the operation needs me to keep running, I didn't finish.
DREEMS, the asset management system I built at Disney, is still running thirty years later. Not because of loyalty. Because it was built right.
That's what I do.
I come alongside you. I find where the structure is ready to shift. I help you build something that lasts.
I build systems that outlast me.
