I build companies that scale without breaking
I'm a chemical engineer who came up running operations, spent years advising CEOs through McKinsey, and have spent 25 years learning what it actually takes to grow a company cleanly. Not the theory of it. The real, on-the-floor, in-the-boardroom work of it.
Why I work across all three levers
For years, I got the same feedback in every room. In operations, I was told I was too focused on people. Among the coaches, too focused on process. Somewhere else, too structured. It took me a long time to understand that I wasn't too much of any one thing. I was working all three levers of a business at once, the work, the structure, and the people, in worlds built to value only one.
Operations wanted me to just fix the system. The coaches wanted me to just develop the people. Neither could see that those things are the same job. A great system with the wrong people fails. Great people with no structure burn out. Direction without execution goes nowhere. I kept insisting on all three because I had seen, over and over, that a company only scales cleanly when the work, the structure, and the people move together.
That's the work I do now, on purpose.
The arc
I started on the plant floor, an engineer formulating and scaling manufacturing at Michelin, then building a new production operation from the ground up at an early-stage clean-tech company. I moved into transformation and operational excellence at Amgen and Boehringer Ingelheim, where I led a site-wide transformation after an acquisition, roughly quadrupling productivity per employee and helping turn a struggling site profitable. At GoPro, I was the first operational-excellence leader, rebuilding core workflows across the company. And through McKinsey, I've advised CEOs and executive teams through operating-model redesigns, a $900M acquisition and integration, and enterprise transformations.
Across all of it, one pattern held: the companies that scaled cleanly were the ones that fixed the system, the structure, and the people together. The ones that pulled a single lever stalled.
How I work
I diagnose before I prescribe. Most engagements start by finding which levers are out of sync, because the visible problem is rarely the real one. Then I do the work with you, not from a slide deck, until the change is durable enough to hold after I'm gone. The measure I care about isn't whether a plan looked good. It's whether the company was still running better a year later.
I'm an operator, not a consultant who has never run anything, and not a coach who only works on mindset. I've carried a P&L's weight, stood on a factory floor at 5 a.m., and coached an executive through the hardest call of their career. I bring all of that, because scaling a company takes all of it.
Background
BS, Chemical Engineering, Purdue University
MBA, Leadership & Managing Organizational Change, Pepperdine University
Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt