ABOUT ME
I'm a strategist who builds tangible things
I’ve spent my career helping businesses make sense of complexity: finding the pattern in too much information, naming the real problem, and turning scattered thinking into clear direction.
Before becoming a founder, I spent 20 years building a career in strategy, with each chapter bringing me closer to the point where strategic thinking becomes real-world action. I started in management consulting, where I learned to think at scale and work through complex business challenges with executive-level stakes. Over time, my work moved closer to the forces that determine whether strategy actually works: the customer, the market, the brand, the business model, and the operating realities underneath it.
Along the way, that work put me inside strategic challenges for companies including Meta, Walmart, Target, PepsiCo, Aldi, Clorox, Comcast, 7-Eleven, Sanofi, and Aramark.
Much of that work happened in the room. I designed and led workshops that helped teams tackle hard problems together, from new marketing programs to brand strategy to operational fixes. Today that experience shapes the people development workshops I design for established organizations, most recently for leadership teams at the Illinois Housing Development Authority.
Building Embers + Apothecary, my experiential candle studio in Chicago’s Printers Row, sharpened everything I thought I knew. Strategy had to meet rent, staffing, customers, pricing, operations, timing, and the practical curveballs that show up once an idea becomes real. It also made me better at the work I do for other founders.
Because even great strategy changes when it meets implementation. Compromises have to be made. The trick is knowing what can flex and what cannot. Without that clarity, the wrong things get sacrificed, and a strong idea can slowly lose its shape.
Today, I work two ways: with founders and business owners who need sharp strategic thinking and a partnership close enough to the work to be useful, and with established organizations whose leaders and teams are growing, changing, or building new skills.
I’m a Notre Dame grad, a chronic critical thinker, and someone who has spent a lifetime finding useful patterns where things don’t obviously fit. If you’re looking for someone who can think clearly, build practically, and stay close to the work long enough to make it real, you’re probably in the right place.