Some Top Skills

My journey begins back in the mid-'90s after I graduated high school and got my first job at a computer company while I went to college. At that point, I didn't know much about computers except how to play a few video games. That would change quickly as I soon learned how to build custom computers and networks. Things really took off when Microsoft Windows 3.1 came out and I started experimenting with something called the World Wide Web.

Fast forward to my senior year in college and the dot com explosion. My entrepreneurial spirit and an opportunity I couldn't resist pushed me into starting my first internet venture. It sounds a little unimpressive but was revolutionary at the time. I started building websites, with cool Flash intro's, for automobile dealerships and uploading digital images of their inventory to the sites. Obviously you needed traffic to these sites so I taught myself SEO and paid internet advertising which nobody understood at the time. Everything was great until the dot com bubble burst. Everyone thought this internet thing was simply a fad and got scared. I had learned a lot of things through this experience and one of my big takeaways was the importance of obtaining visitors and converting them into customers. The skills I had around SEO were invaluable for this, but I also knew this was just the beginning.

So I decided to go get a real job and give up my sweet gig working out of my mom's attic. It was probably the best decision I ever made. Over the next year and a half, I worked with an amazing startup called 360i and surrounded myself with some of the smartest people I had ever met. We became one of the first internet companies to specialize in SEO and paid search before anyone had ever heard of Google. We were so good that both Monster and CareerBuilder became our clients even though they were direct competitors. Business took off and soon we were working with a lot of the Fortune 500. This included Microsoft, Universal Studios, Cars.com, Apartments.com and many more.

Eventually, companies started realizing they needed to bring these search skillsets in house and so I transitioned to working with another larger startup called Jackson Healthcare. At the time the company was growing pretty quickly in the very old school, traditional, physician staffing industry. When I joined there were about 100 employees and they threw me in with the 3 person development team. The leadership had amazing foresight to realize the importance of the web and so our mission became creating what would become one of the largest physician job boards on the internet. Over the next few years, that is exactly what we did and it became a strategic advantage that capitulated our companies growth. The website quickly grew to achieve over 20 million dollars in revenue annually. My role also continued to grow and soon I was leading a 5 member search engine marketing and analytics team. Eventually, through acquisition and growth, we were managing 10+ web properties and 5 different operating companies.

Towards the end of 2010, I took a new role within Jackson Healthcare that would leverage more of my entrepreneur skillsets and started working with our smaller startups. My focus was to leverage my technology and marketing expertise to help accelerate growth and gain market share. Within just a couple years we grew 3 web properties into generating over 15,000,000 dollars in revenue. Our team created the companies first iPhone app and were the internal thought leaders in terms of innovation.

A couple of years later I took on one of my biggest challenges by completely bootstrapping a new web property in a new staffing vertical. I secured a great aftermarket domain and built the website plus two native mobile apps in less than a year. The entire project leveraged a small offshore team of contractors and I led the user experience, design, development and launch strategy. Within just a few short years this site became the largest job board in this vertical and had 30,000+ members.

My latest role was created to spread innovation within one of our largest companies at Jackson Healthcare. This included developing a digital transformation plan that would integrate innovation within multiple departments. A key component of this was adopting the design thinking methodology and leading workshops to drive adoption of the new plan. Another component was looking at ways to incorporate process automation, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to drive efficiency across the company. The last component was leading the product team in building an online,mobile-focused workforce platform. This was the companies first customer-facing software application and we delivered the MVP in less than 6 months. Within the first year, we exceeded our customer adoption and engagement goals by 60%.

Today I am looking for another venture that would leverage my skills to build amazing software that people love. It's kind of funny and probably just the geek inside of me, but there are certain products I use that increase my endorphins and simply make me happy. That is what I am passionate about building.