A little more about me.
I'm a systems engineer turned operations partner. For 18 years, across aerospace, defense, financial services, and automotive, I was handed complex projects with little guidance and asked to lead anyway, including the systems team on a NASA-backed program that put my name on three pending patents. Now I step into founders' businesses and make the complexity make sense, starting with you, not your systems.
Where I started
I've always been a planner. Think plans on plans on plans. Super analytical, very career driven, and I was that person who always thought ten steps ahead.
I was intuitive too. I just didn't trust it unless it "made sense." So I created spreadsheets to make it make sense. I had a spreadsheet for almost everything. From which job to take to which city to live in. I even made a spreadsheet for which sofa to get. I wish I was lying. I still have it somewhere on my Google Drive.
While I was very much data-driven, I still could not deny the quiet voice within.
The first time I really listened, nothing was wrong. In fact, everything in my life was going exactly right. I'd just moved in with my best friend, started making new friends, found a new gym, and finally felt like I knew what I was doing after two years into my job.
According to the data, I was happy.
Then a thought showed up out of nowhere: I want to move to the east coast. I dismissed it. Because f*ck that. Moving is terrible, I had just done it three months prior, and it made no sense for me to have this thought. Therefore, that thought must be wrong.
Three months later, it came back.
So I decided, why not? I put it in my performance review. My boss told me it was unlikely to ever happen.
Two months later, he came to my desk. A program that was over budget and behind schedule needed someone on site in upstate New York. Was I still interested?
I very clearly remember having the thought: Holy crap, was the universe actually listening??
I ended up in upstate New York for one magical year.
To this day, I still look back on that year with great fondness. It was the first time something really cracked open in me and I realized there was more to life than my plans. Apparently there is this thing called joy that when one tunes into and takes action from that place, the universe responds accordingly.
When the temporary assignment ended, I knew I wanted to stay. I ended up with two job offers, and though my gut said take the one outside engineering, I still felt compelled to create, you guessed it! A spreadsheet. I aptly named it First World Problem.
Then after all that work, I ended up following my gut anyway.
You know what they say. You have to learn to crawl before you can walk. Let’s just say I had to do a lot of crawling before I learned to trust my intuition or any gut instinct over data.
Discovering my Inner World
I spent seven years upstate. I went back into engineering and kept climbing the corporate ladder. At the same time, I got curious about myself. I started questioning things about myself that I always assumed to be true. Things like: What do I actually love to do? Is it true that I am always a social butterfly or do I actually like being alone from time to time?
I began exploring resources like Myers-Briggs, the Enneagram, Attachment Theory, and The Adult Chair® podcast. That curiosity eventually led me to become a Certified Adult Chair® Master Coach.
What I noticed was, the more quiet I let in, the clearer the intuitive hits got.
Then the pandemic hit and the world went quiet. My calendar went from insanely full to completely blank. Suddenly, I had time for things like daily walks, art, playing my guitar, learning how to play the ukulele.
And I actually thrived. My mind was quiet for the first time in a long time.
In January 2021, it happened again. Snap of the fingers: I want to move to New York City.
This time, I didn't argue. I also didn't have a plan. My only plan was to do one thing a day toward the move. I owned a three-bedroom house and a car, and my job would probably want me back in the office. I didn't care.
Four months later, I'd sold the house and the car, moved into my apartment, and negotiated a fully remote option with my job.
Finally listening to my body
Three years later, I was leading a project I was passionate about. I'd learned how to lead without taking everything on. I had great boundaries between work and my personal life. I wasn't burned out. And yet, I wasn't happy.
What I was doing was staying up way past my bedtime, reading novel after novel. I was escaping my own life one fiction book at a time.
One day, I looked up from my book. The sun was shining, and it hit me: something is seriously wrong.
I couldn’t ignore it anymore so the next day, I took the day off. The moment I sent the last message moving my meetings, I immediately felt a weight drop from my body. I felt an instant joy and energy, even after only four hours of sleep. I realized my body was trying to tell me something.
Two days later, I put in my two weeks' notice. And I didn’t even need a spreadsheet to do it. For the first time, I made a major decision by fully listening to my body.
This is why I fully believe intuition isn't the opposite of strategy. It's the beginning of it.
I made my decision so much faster by not waiting for the data to be there. Not waiting for it to “make sense.”
Where I am now
These days, I see my old self in a lot of the founders I work with. They've built something real and quietly become the thing it runs on. They're capable, everyone counts on them, and they're still waiting for every decision to "make sense" before they let themselves move.
If that sounds like you, here's how I work. I still use everything engineering taught me about structure and process. The difference is where I start. Before I suggest a single system, I get to know you and your vision for your business and your life. Those become our anchor points. They guide every decision we make, including the structure and support you actually want.