About
What I actually do is ask questions, figure out what drives people and companies, and align resources to make things work better.
That sentence is the most honest answer I can give to “what’s your job.” It’s also the through-line of a career that on paper looks like four or five different careers — and in practice has been one thing the whole time.
How I got here
Five chapters. One question, asked five different ways.
The chapters, briefly. ATA Airlines out of undergrad — strategic planning during a Chapter 11 restructuring, which is a strange first job and a useful one. M3 Capital Partners after the MBA at IESE — five years of institutional real estate private equity in Chicago, contributing to $8B+ in equity transactions and, in the last stretch, working on-site with portfolio company management teams. Novartis next — four years in the CFO development program, three countries (Switzerland, Canada, Portugal), Animal Health to Pharma, group capital markets to country finance. Baxter after that — portfolio profitability work and the servitization build in US Renal Care, which got the business out of being a pure product company. Cypher Protocol in the middle of all of that, as a co-founder on the Solana side — a chapter that didn’t fit the others but taught me how to ship inside an unfamiliar domain. And then DeGeorge, the residential plumbing and HVAC company I bought in 2022 and have been running since.
Five chapters isn’t the standard finance résumé. Specialists pick a vertical and go deep. I went wide — different industries, different geographies, different scales, different problems. The range was deliberate. The thing I’m interested in is the underneath of how businesses work, and the only way to learn the underneath is to keep being dropped into businesses you don’t yet understand and figure them out.
The work I do now is the synthesis. Fortune 500 finance discipline applied with an operator’s understanding of what actually gets used and what doesn’t. That combination is the unusual shape, and it’s what the consulting offer is built on.
How I work
The challenge is the thing. The industry is incidental.
Some people build a career around a specific industry or product they’re passionate about. I never did. What pulls me into the work is the challenge itself — the question of how a particular business actually works, where its real margin lives, which two or three decisions would move it forward, and which dozen are noise dressed up as priority.
That orientation has a practical consequence. I can listen across a wide range of industries and see patterns that more vertically focused people miss — because the patterns are usually about the shape of the problem, not the substance of the industry. A pricing discipline problem in a medical device portfolio and a pricing discipline problem in a residential services business are the same problem in different clothing. The clothing matters; the problem matters more.
If you’re the kind of operator who’s been told by another advisor that they “don’t do your industry,” that’s the gap I sit in. Industry expertise is what specialists sell. Pattern recognition across industries is what I sell. For most operators of $15M–$50M businesses, the second one is more useful than the first.
Outside the work
The work isn’t separate from the life. It never has been.
The international chapters were as much about how I wanted to live as about where the career took me. Skiing and the outdoors in Switzerland. Food and racket sports in Spain. Surfing in Portugal — I am a terrible surfer, and Portugal is the right place to be terrible. Flying out of Chicago and now Scottsdale; I’m a private pilot, which is its own kind of training in decision discipline under pressure.
Music has been the steady current underneath everything. I’m a fanatic and a production-quality nerd, and I lean toward the Grateful Dead and Phish — bands that play four-hour shows that are never the same twice. Some of that’s curiosity. Some of it is the same orientation that shows up in the work: I like the moments when a system finds something none of its participants knew it was going to produce.
I read across history, biography, and the business shelf, but the book I keep returning to is The Odyssey. It is, among other things, a story about a senior operator with deep range spending a long time trying to get home to the business he actually wants to run. I notice the resonance. I don’t think it’s an accident that it stuck.
Off the page: my wife, our two dogs, and a lot of time outdoors and in the gym. That’s the life. The work is built around it, not the other way around.
If you’re an operator of a $15M–$50M business with a decision coming up that matters, that’s the work. The best way to find out whether it’s the right fit is a conversation.