About
I started in a classroom.
Everything I do now makes more sense if you know that first.
Eight years teaching
I taught for about eight years — elementary and high school, in whatever capacity a school needed filled. ESL. English. History. I coached volleyball. I taught robotics, and eventually coding.
That's a strange-looking list, and it's the most useful thing on my résumé. Public schools run on people who take the thing nobody else can cover. You learn to work with what's in the building, explain hard ideas to someone who didn't ask to be there, and get something out the door by Monday because thirty people are waiting on it.
I also burned out. Not on the work — on the conditions. Too many jobs, not enough hours, and no realistic way to do any of them properly. I left, and it took me a while to understand that what I wanted wasn't a different mission. It was a sustainable way to serve one.
Learning to build
I taught myself to code and went to work for the Department of Defense.
It was a short stint, but it was my introduction to how public institutions actually buy and run technology — the documentation, the review, the reasons things move at the pace they move. When someone at a city tells me their procurement process takes four months, I'm not surprised and I'm not annoyed.
Enterprise scale
From there I moved to Charter Spectrum, working in business intelligence and data security.
A Fortune 500 telecom is where you learn what data looks like at real volume, and what happens when it isn't handled carefully. Most of the nonprofit work this practice is built for is a smaller version of the same problem: three systems that disagree about who your donors are, and nobody with time to reconcile them.
Consulting
Then a small consulting firm, working with fintech clients and large corporations.
Websites, data structures, product launches, security hardening — whatever the engagement called for. Fintech in particular teaches you to build like someone's going to audit it, because someone is. I still build that way. It's why "we handle donor payment information" doesn't make me nervous.
Being the whole department
The last stop was a startup, and it's the one that most directly explains what I'm doing now.
I handled every part of it. The website, the app, the servers, the deployments, the things that broke at eleven at night. There was no team to escalate to — the escalation path was me.
The company eventually folded. They asked me to stay on and help turn it off, which I did. Then the business pivoted, and turning things off became running everything: the full stack, every service, all of it. What was supposed to be a wind-down became the job.
That's where I've been. And it's the exact shape of what I'm offering now — one senior person who holds the whole picture, sticks around, and doesn't need a team of five to keep the lights on.
Why this particular background matters to you.
I've been on your side of the table
I worked in an underfunded institution with too few people and too much to do. When you tell me the events calendar has been broken since spring because nobody has time, I'm not judging that. I've been the person who didn't have time.
I can explain things to people who aren't technical
Eight years of making hard ideas land with teenagers who had other plans. Your board will understand what I'm recommending, and so will the staff who have to live with it.
I've seen how institutions really buy
Defense, enterprise, and regulated finance. Procurement cycles, security review, documentation requirements, and audits. None of it slows me down or catches me off guard.
I've run everything alone before
Not as an experiment. As a job, for years, with real users depending on it. Being a one-person practice isn't me testing whether I can — it's the thing I've already been doing.
What I'm like to work with.
I'm direct, and I'd rather tell you something you don't want to hear in month one than in month nine. If a project is a bad idea, or the tool you're about to buy is wrong, or the real problem is a process rather than software, I'll say so.
I don't disappear between meetings. You'll know what I'm working on and what's next, in plain language, without having to chase me for it.
And I don't build things that only I can maintain. The point of a long engagement isn't to make you dependent on me — it's that you shouldn't have to think about this stuff at all, and if I ever step away, the next person should be able to pick it up without a rescue mission.
Why "KitchenSinkWorks."
Everything but the kitchen sink. It started as a joke about my résumé — ESL and volleyball and robotics and data security and fintech and servers — and then it stopped being a joke, because that range is the actual offer.
Small organizations don't have a website problem or a data problem or an AI problem. They have all of them at once, in different sizes, arriving in no particular order. Hiring separate specialists for each isn't realistic on your budget. One person who's done all of it is.
Based in St. Louis.
I'll work with organizations wherever they are, but there's real value in being able to sit in the room when it matters — a board presentation, a staff training, a launch week. If you're in the St. Louis area, I'll show up.
If any of that sounded like the person you need.
A half-hour call, no pitch. Tell me what's breaking and what's coming, and I'll tell you honestly whether I'm the right fit.
Book a fit call