The pattern
At Optiv, I inherited a risk assessment process that took three months per cycle. Three months of manual data entry, email chains, duplicate work, and decisions made on stale information. The instinct in most organizations would be to hire more people or buy more software.
I did neither. I mapped the workflow, found that the bottleneck wasn't capacity — it was structure — and rebuilt the system around Power Automate and SharePoint so that the same work happened in a week. That's a 92% reduction. The headcount stayed the same. The chaos left.
A few months later I built executive dashboards that collapsed a three-day reporting cycle into thirty minutes. Not because the technology was clever, but because I'd sat in enough leadership meetings to understand exactly which questions executives were actually trying to answer.
The best process work is invisible. You stop noticing it when it works. You only remember what it was like before.
That's the pattern. Before Optiv it was database optimization at UST Global — rescuing 10,000-line stored procedures for State Street's financial systems, under timelines that didn't allow for failure. Before that, insurance implementation coordination at Cigna. Different industries, different tools, same underlying question: why is this harder than it needs to be, and what would it take to fix it for good?
Why AI, and why now
I didn't come to AI because it's the current thing. I came to it because it's the most powerful lever I've encountered for eliminating the category of work that shouldn't exist in the first place.
But I've also watched organizations rush toward AI adoption in ways that guarantee failure — solving problems they haven't defined, automating processes that should be redesigned, deploying tools without understanding what they're optimizing for.
So I built Wolflow — a tool that walks any organization through seven decision gates before recommending AI at all. It stops early when a simpler solution exists. Most of the time, the answer isn't "no AI ever." It's "not yet, and here's what needs to happen first." And then Wolfpath, which takes any workflow and maps a sequenced adoption roadmap with real effort and impact estimates.
These tools exist because I needed to think through the problem rigorously. They turned out to be useful to other people too.
The chapter that doesn't fit neatly on a resume
In 2008, I designed a measuring tape for woodworkers — a clear tape that let you see through to your work instead of blocking it with an opaque ruler. I took it from sketch to manufacturing to distribution. Rockler and Lee Valley Tools placed orders. Woodworking Magazine named it Best New Tool.
The company didn't survive. The margins were too thin, the distribution too slow, the timing wrong in ways I couldn't fully control. But I learned something that no job had taught me: the distance between a good idea and a thing that actually works in someone's hands is enormous, and most of it is unglamorous.
I think about that constantly when I'm building software. Especially when something works in testing and fails in production. Especially when a user does something I didn't anticipate. The physical product world is unforgiving in ways that make you a more careful builder everywhere else.
How I'm wired
I can't turn it off, because I believe noticing obligates you. Proximity is a form of ownership. The person who walks past a mess — any kind of mess — and thinks 'someone should fix that' has already made a choice.
This is not a professional skill I developed. It's closer to a minor affliction. But it means I arrive at every engagement already asking the questions most people don't get to until month three.
I live in St. Louis with my family. The obsession comes with me everywhere, but they've learned to find it endearing.
Career in brief
Let's talk
I'm looking for a full-time role where asking hard questions before building is considered a feature, not a delay. If your organization is trying to figure out where AI actually belongs — not just how to say you're doing AI — that's the conversation I want to have.