About
I'm an operator. I take service businesses that have outgrown the way they're run and rebuild them from the product outward.
The short version
I'm the General Manager of Adventure Idaho, a multi-site outdoor recreation company operating on federal and state permits in Idaho. I run operations, marketing, and sales, I lead a seasonal team of 45, and I built the software the company runs on.
How I got here
At 22 I bought a locksmith business in Rexburg, Idaho. It was tiny, somewhere around five to eight thousand dollars of annual revenue. I expanded the services, fixed the pricing, built a crew that could cover 24/7 calls, grew it about six times over, and sold it. Six times a small number is still a small number, and I'd never present it as a meaningful exit. But I found it, bought it, ran it, and sold it, which taught me more about pricing and staffing than anything since.
In between I sold door to door, which is the fastest education in rejection and conversion available anywhere, and spent ten months at a roughly $40M company working on international distribution and sales operations. I also guided multi-day wilderness trips on the Middle Fork of the Salmon, which is where the operations problem I'd spend the next several years solving first became obvious to me.
What I believe about operations
Fix the invisible leaks first. The money a business is losing quietly is almost always larger and easier to recover than the money it could win with a new initiative.
Build the system, don't do the task. Anything done twice by hand is a system waiting to exist.
Get the owner out of the critical path. A business that only works when one person remembers everything isn't a business yet, it's a job with employees.
Make it visible. You can't manage or improve what nobody can see.
Other things
I'm an FAA-certificated private pilot, which is relevant mostly because aviation runs on checklists and my first move at Adventure Idaho was writing them. I'm an Eagle Scout, I hold an Idaho outfitter and guide license, and I'm involved with the surf wave project in Twin Falls. I spent two years doing full-time volunteer service in Southern California.