Plan A

In 2010 I was finishing the last semester of a chemistry degree at Towson University and applying for jobs as a forensic trace analyst. That was the plan. Then the economy fell apart, nobody was hiring, and my student loans were coming due whether I found work or not.

It wasn't my first plan, either. As a teenager I spent about four years in a Pizza Hut kitchen, working my way from cook to running the restaurant, thanks to a few good managers who took the time to teach me. Later I worked in banking and studied accounting on the way to becoming a CPA, before chemistry pulled me in a different direction.

The short-term gig

A friend introduced me to the CEO of UsedCardboardBoxes. The company was based in Los Angeles and had just opened its first warehouse outside Baltimore, and they were scrambling to get it under control. The business model was simple: pay companies more than recycling rates for their used boxes, sell them for less than new ones, cut down fewer trees, create jobs here in the US, and run it efficiently enough to turn a profit.

I knew nothing about manufacturing or packaging, but I was hungry and eager to prove myself. I started as employee number five, a production associate sorting and stacking thousands of boxes a day by hand. It was supposed to be a short-term gig.

The backlog

In my first few weeks the warehouse was buried. About two dozen trailers were waiting to be unloaded, we could empty about one a shift, and more kept pulling in. Nobody had asked me to fix it, so I made a plan anyway: who worked when, how trucks were scheduled at the dock, how the floor was laid out, and how a box moved from the trailer to a customer's order. We cleared it in about two and a half weeks.

The CEO asked me to stay. Within about three months I'd gone from production associate to forklift operator, shift leader and then plant manager.

Sixteen years, nine roles

What followed was sixteen years of learning every job in the company, usually by doing it first. I sold some of our biggest accounts from the plant before I ever had a sales title, growing one from two truckloads a month to as many as two a day. I earned a DOT license and drove a 26-foot truck myself to make a small account work. I opened new sites and helped take the company national, moved to Los Angeles to build out revenue operations and customer experience, and settled in San Diego, where I became VP of Revenue Operations and then Chief Revenue Officer and Chief Information Officer.

As CRO and CIO I ran revenue and the technology behind it as one job. We rebuilt the sales team, built a customer experience team that kept NPS at 80 for nine years, and doubled revenue in my last four and a half years with no outside capital. The part I'm proudest of is the people. Every director in my org came up from within. I maintain to this day that the best opportunities should be reserved for those that have earned it and are ready for it.

Stepping away

In September 2026, after sixteen years, I left UCB. I'm proud of what we built and grateful to the people who built it with me.

I took a month with my family, then did what I always do and started building. I set up AI agents that watch an industry and send me cited summaries. I'm building tools for my wife Alex's calligraphy business. And I audited my own career, every role and every promotion, to find where I did my best work and where I had the most fun doing it.

The answer kept coming back the same. I love taking operations of almost any kind, from sales and fulfillment to product and HR, and turning them into systems that run on their own. Find the friction, fix it, write it down, and stay with it until people use it.

What's next

I want to keep doing that for a team with a mission worth the work, values people live by, and a strategy everyone can repeat. If that sounds like your team, I'd like to hear from you.