Club from a 20-person startup to more than a million members and a Nordstrom acquisition. I built a manufacturing marketplace from zero and steered a team through an IPO, layoffs, and a company's closure without losing the people or the plot.

Then I pointed all of it at mission-driven work. At DonorsChoose — a nonprofit raising over $150M a year — I incubated and launched its first-ever consumer brand from idea to market in six months, building the go-to-market plan, the operational framework, and the financial model myself. I know how to make a spreadsheet behave and how to build something people fall in love with. That combination is rarer than it should be — and it's exactly what a growing nonprofit needs.

So why leave a good role to build Mostly Managed?

Because everywhere I've worked, I've ended up being the same thing: the person who spots the missing system and quietly becomes the connective tissue holding it together. I loved that work most when it served a mission. And the deeper I got into the nonprofit world, the clearer one thing became — small and mid-sized organizations doing some of the most important work in their communities are running on duct tape and devotion. They need executive-level strategy and operations, but can't justify a full-time hire to get it.

For many of them, I can be that hire — fractionally. That's the whole idea behind Mostly Managed.

And I'm not making this case from the sidelines. I'm currently the Managing Director of Children's Theatre of Elgin, building its financial, operational, and strategic foundation from the studs up — making the same hard calls about budgets, space, staffing, and growth that you make every week. I'm doing the work I'm offering you, right now, in real time.

The way I work comes down to holding two things at once. One half of me maps the system — who owns what, where decisions get stuck, which fragile dependency is one resignation away from a crisis. The other half reads the human side — the culture, the story, the why this matters that makes people show up. Strategy that ignores either one falls apart. So I build plans rigorous enough to actually execute, and human enough that your team and your board will rally behind them.

I'm also allergic to the 40-page report nobody reads. What I care about is coherence — your values, your operations, and your story finally pointing the same direction — and momentum. The goal was never a prettier binder. It's an organization that can breathe, grow, and do more of what it exists to do.

That's the real reason I do this. Not efficiency for its own sake — transformation. When you build the structure beneath a mission well, you free the people inside it to become more fully themselves, and let the organization become what it was always reaching toward.

If you're in a season of growth, transition, or "we've clearly outgrown how we've been doing this" — I'd love to talk.