Career Journey
From laying bricks to building software, my career has been defined by continuous learning, problem-solving, and a drive to create meaningful solutions.
Career Journey
Autobiographical Narrative: My Life in Masonry and Construction
From the time I was old enough to carry a block, I was on job sites with my family. My masonry days started in middle school, working for my grandfather's company, Dickens Masonry. In the beginning the work was simple: stock the bricks, haul the materials, and learn to spread mortar, what we called "mud." I'd spend long summer days on the site, watching my dad and my grandfather, picking up the skills and the habits that make a mason a little at a time.
As I got older, the work got bigger. I started running saw cuts, building scaffolding, and taking on the more technical jobs. Eventually I joined my grandfather on the road, hauling trailers loaded with scaffolding across Missouri, Iowa, Kansas, and Oklahoma. Getting crews ready, making sure the materials showed up, setting up the sites: that is where I learned about responsibility, planning, and working as a team, and I learned it young.
By my late teens and early twenties I was in it all the way. I worked alongside my uncle, a general contractor, pushing wheelbarrows, cleaning up sites, and laboring wherever I was needed. My stepdad was a general contractor too, and through him I got a look at interior commercial work. I watched and sometimes helped with cabinet installs and interior finishes, the detailed side of building that runs opposite to the heavy, outdoor work of masonry.
After my grandfather passed away, I joined the bricklayers union. That took me onto large projects across the region with my father, including big builds like Republic High School in Republic, Missouri. I spent a couple of years on that job alone. I learned the craft, and I learned the discipline it takes to hold your own on a union crew. I got OSHA-trained, learned the safe use of saws, jackhammers, demolition equipment, and heavy machinery, and started to develop an eye for structural integrity and how a building actually goes together.
Bricklaying taught me more than how to set block and brick. It showed me how a building comes together from the ground up: foundations, block walls, veneer brick, and all the coordination with the electricians, the plumbers, and the other trades. I saw up close how much communication, safety, and precision matter when people are working shoulder to shoulder. It built values in me that stuck: hard work, reliability, and a habit of solving problems. And I learned leadership by example, whether that meant organizing a crew, managing materials, or keeping a job on schedule.
When the 2008 recession hit, I was laid off from union work. That was the turning point that sent me back to school to look for a new path. But the skills and the work ethic never left me. From discipline and safety to adaptability and teamwork, my years in masonry made me into someone who can lead, manage, and keep going when a job gets hard.
Bricklaying was never just a job. It was the foundation for the way I approach work, and life, to this day.
Restaurant & Early Work Experience
I started working before I was old enough to drive. My first real job was at Celebration Station in Knoxville, Tennessee, where I was hired as a video game technician, repairing and maintaining the arcade machines for customers. That job gave me my first real look at how a company is put together: the training programs, the organizational charts, the systems and the supervision that keep a business running. I got promoted to trainer and started mentoring the new hires, and if I hadn't been a minor I'd probably have been offered a supervisor role. It stuck with me, how much a good training program is worth.
As a teenager I also worked at Wendy's, first in Knoxville and later in Hatboro, Pennsylvania. Those jobs taught me about consistency. A customer can walk into any location in the country and expect the same food and the same experience, and I came to respect the systems and the processes that make that possible.
As I got older I moved deeper into restaurant work, and I spent a good while waiting tables at The Gondolier. I learned both sides of the house, front and back, and I became someone the team could count on. Knowing the kitchen as well as the floor gave me an edge. It was actually through that job that I got recruited to run facilities for the Fabulous Family Fun Center in Hickory, North Carolina. The owners were a husband-and-wife team who had trained at my Gondolier location before they opened their own amusement center with go-karts, batting cages, and arcades. They liked my work ethic and offered me the management role. That was a real opportunity, overseeing operations, managing staff, and seeing up close what it actually takes to run a small business, the wins and the struggles both.
Along the way I worked in other restaurants too, places like Trips and Rafferty's, serving and working the kitchen. Those jobs drove home the value of teamwork, cross-training, and staying calm when the rush hits. A busy kitchen teaches you to think on your feet, manage what people expect from you, and push through a hard night. Those lessons have followed me far beyond the restaurant.
During my college years at the University of Tennessee, I tended bar at The Urban Bar in Knoxville. I could work nights and take classes during the day, which sharpened my sense of time and my patience with stressful, customer-facing situations. Later, while I was studying engineering technology at Pellissippi State and working for ForeMost Construction, I pulled evening shifts as a Starbucks barista. Starbucks ran an organized, welcoming shop, leaned on technology to keep things efficient, and put real effort into cross-training and developing its people. I was there under a year, but it left a mark.
Add it all up, the arcades, the restaurants, the bars, the coffee shops, and it gave me a wide set of skills in customer service, leadership, and running a business day to day. I learned to thrive under pressure, to manage a team, and to appreciate the systems that keep a business steady and dependable. Just as much, I came away with a lasting respect for hard work, for the people you work beside, and for the lesson in every job, no matter how small it looks at the time.
My Journey at Ozarks Technical Community College
Going back to college came at one of the most pivotal times of my life. I had just found out I was going to be a father, and right around then I was laid off from the bricklayers union in the recession. The choice was simple to lay out and hard to make: draw unemployment, or go find a new path. I chose school. I still remember walking into the admissions office at Ozarks Technical Community College in Springfield, Missouri, in dusty jeans with a tape measure still hanging off my belt from the jobsite. I told the woman at the desk, "If I can lay bricks, I can do anything. Sign me up."
I aimed high at first. I was thinking about an MBA someday. But I started where you start, with computer science courses, learning databases and the basics of programming, and I caught up on my general education along the way, including the math I hadn't touched in years. To my own surprise, I started pulling straight A's.
Life was full, to put it mildly. I carried 15 credit hours as a full-time student while working full-time as the night manager for a local hotel and its restaurant, and I was a brand-new father on top of it. Those were some of the hardest and best days I've had.
I didn't finish my associate degree at OTC. I was down to my last class or two, maybe a Spanish course and one more, when life handed me another turn. After the divorce, my son's mother moved him to North Carolina, and I had to pull up my own life to follow him. Finishing school right then wasn't possible.
Even without the degree in hand, my time at OTC mattered. I built discipline, I picked up real skills in computer science, and I proved to myself that I could do the academic work. Those credits transferred cleanly later on, to the University of Tennessee, to Pellissippi State, to ETSU, and they kept my education moving.
Looking back, Ozarks Technical Community College is where I rebuilt my life. It's where I learned that grit and determination could carry me through just about anything, and that even in a hard stretch, you can take the first step toward something better.
University of Tennessee: Growth, Learning, and Perseverance
My time at the University of Tennessee was as much about growing up as it was about grades. I enrolled after moving back to Knoxville to be near my son and my family. Being a father came first. I wanted to be in his life with regular visits, to support him, and to be someone he could look up to. I hoped that if he saw me chasing an education, he'd learn to value learning and perseverance himself when his turn came.
I auditioned for the School of Music and got in as a musicology major. For about four semesters I lived in it. I sang in the men's chorus, took piano lessons, and put in all the extra work a music student carries: ear training, rehearsals, and one-credit courses that quietly ate up hours. The load was heavy, made heavier because I was also working full-time in restaurants and bars to make ends meet and cover child support. A nontraditional student in his 30s, a father, and a full-time worker all at once. It was a lot.
Eventually I saw that staying a music major just wasn't going to work under those circumstances, so I switched to Communications. Along the way I got into all sorts of things. I student-taught fourth graders in math and science, which was a joy, getting to spark something in young kids. I took an advanced sound design course and worked at the Clarence Brown Theatre, learning sound engineering and finding my way around complicated audio software, which turned out to have a lot in common with user interface and user experience design.
One of the strangest and best experiences I had was a year-long, doctoral-level course at the Bredesen Center on energy science. I was an undergraduate sitting among nuclear physicists and top science students. We covered advanced physics, energy policy, and sustainable technologies, and our final project took on innovative energy solutions. My group worked on carbon capture devices for power plants. Presenting to former governor Phil Bredesen was humbling and inspiring both. Some of the physics went right over my head, but the class fed my lifelong curiosity about how things work and deepened my love for science and technology.
Outside my core classes, I took poetry, planetary science, geology, and calculus. So many subjects pulled at me that I ended up with more than 120 credit hours, driven by plain love of learning rather than any tidy specialization. More than once I signed up for a class just because a poster in a hallway caught my eye.
In the end, money forced me to put school on hold. Even so, UT changed me. It taught me resilience, curiosity, and how to hold ambition and responsibility in the same two hands. Through all the late nights and all the juggling of school, work, and fatherhood, I never lost sight of why I was there: to be better, and to set an example for my son. My time at UT was never really about the credits. It was about growth, determination, and building toward a brighter future for the both of us.
Threds Inc.: From Shipping to Self-Created Engineering Role
I first came to Threds Inc. in Knoxville, Tennessee, just looking for a day job. A couple of my friends already worked there, one in sales and one in shipping and receiving, so I followed them in and took a spot in the shipping department. The work was straightforward: pull the fulfillment orders, pack the boxes, and put up with a warehouse that ran hot in summer and cold in winter. The pay wasn't much and the work was hard, but it was honest, and it gave me a front-row seat to a company with a real story.
Threds got its start back in 1994 selling blue jeans out of a Jeep Cherokee, and it had grown into a multimillion-dollar print shop. By the time I got there, they were making T-shirts, running embroidery, and handling fulfillment for national brands like Mercury boat motors, Mellow Mushroom, and Salsarita's. They managed drop shipping, ran order fulfillment for a range of e-commerce sites, and even did local deliveries around Knoxville. A small business at heart, but one with real reach.
Not long after I started, I noticed something nobody else seemed in a hurry to touch: the expensive machinery wasn't being kept up. There were roughly 25 presses and specialized machines, not counting the embroidery equipment, and a lot of them were literally collecting dust. Air leaks hissed through the pneumatic lines, oil mist caked the filters, and the big Ingersoll Rand air compressor needed attention. The dryers that cured the screen-printed shirts had worn-out elements. The whole operation was running under strain.
Rather than watch it all wear down, I decided to do something about it. The owners couldn't pay me more for the extra work, so I negotiated for something worth just as much: a title. With their blessing I became the Assistant Chief Engineer, a nod to the company's retired Chief Engineer, the owner's father, who still held the title but lived out of state and only came around now and then. Once I had the title, I made it real. I worked with the procurement manager to get an extra mechanic's shirt, and I had the embroidery manager stitch a maintenance logo and my name onto it. From then on I had a title and a mission both. I serviced the machines on weekends when production was down, cleaning filters, swapping dryer elements, chasing leaks, keeping the presses running right. It was deeply satisfying, hands-on work, and it took me straight back to my mechanical roots and my sense of ownership.
On top of the maintenance, I often ran deliveries when local orders needed to get to customers. That turned me into a face of the company. Driving around Knoxville, I got to know the community better and helped keep our client relationships strong.
Even with my hands mostly on the machines, I paid attention to how the business ran. Threds used a FileMaker Pro database for fulfillment, and I watched how the departments, design and sales and shipping and embroidery, all worked together. It was my first real look at how a small but growing business ties its operations into one thing. I even got to see the company expand, adding a new warehouse and another building to the campus, and I pitched in on the projects that came with the growth.
In time I outgrew the role. Threds was a small company, and much as I valued the experience and the friends I made there, they couldn't offer me the pay or the path I needed. I gave my two weeks' notice and left on good terms, proud of the work and grateful for the lessons.
Looking back, Threds was more than a day job. It was where I learned to take initiative, claim responsibility, and build real skills in maintenance, logistics, and small-business operations. I walked away with confidence, a sense of accomplishment, and a deep respect for the people and the community who grew that company from a Jeep full of blue jeans into something a whole lot bigger.
My Time at Homesource of East Tennessee
Homesource of East Tennessee was one of the most formative jobs of my career. Homesource is a nonprofit property management organization based in Knoxville, dedicated to providing homes for low-income families, senior citizens, and people with disabilities. I served on the maintenance team, helping care for nearly 300 properties spread across several counties, everything from small single-family houses to larger apartment complexes.
No two days looked the same. A big part of the work was "turns," getting a unit ready for the next tenant after someone moved out. That could mean electrical repairs, plumbing, carpentry, drywall, flooring, and sometimes coordinating with subcontractors. I took pride in keeping my work truck clean and stocked with the tools and materials to handle whatever the day threw at me. When a job needed specialty supplies, I'd run to the hardware store with the company card or pull what I needed from our shop.
Now and then I worked the general contractor side of the company too, helping build senior apartment homes. One of the highlights was putting my bricklaying skills to use on a restoration project, a chance to bring my old trade into my everyday work. Every project had its headaches, but there was always a purpose underneath: we were making homes better for people who genuinely needed them.
Being part of Homesource meant more than fixing things. We dealt with tenants face to face, and I learned how much it matters to be approachable, understanding, and patient. We rotated on-call duty, handling emergency repairs at all hours. When the phone rang in the middle of the night, I had to be ready to get in the truck and go to whatever property needed help.
Because Homesource leaned on grants and federal funding, compliance was serious business. We had to hold a high standard to pass inspections and meet every requirement, and that taught me the value of doing a thing right the first time, no matter how small.
I was at Homesource through the COVID-19 pandemic, which made everything harder. As essential workers, we kept caring for the properties while most of the world was shut in. Extra precautions, PPE, and distancing were the rule, especially around our senior residents, who were the most vulnerable of anyone.
Leaving was bittersweet. I loved the variety of the work, the camaraderie of the maintenance crew, and the plain satisfaction of knowing my hours went straight into people's lives. I even had the strange privilege of maintaining a property where my own grandmother lived, and I'd run into her on my rounds. But as much as I believed in the mission, I needed a higher wage to support my family of three children, so I moved into a commercial maintenance role that offered better stability.
I still look back on Homesource with pride. It was a stretch of hard work, problem-solving, and real growth, and it sharpened not just my hands but my appreciation for what a safe, well-kept home means in a person's life.
Autobiographical Account: My Journey at Pellissippi State
There was a moment when the path toward a better life came clear. I was living in Knoxville, Tennessee, working as a maintenance technician for HomeSource of East Tennessee, driving my truck from property to property and taking care of residential units, all while juggling family: one son living in North Carolina and two stepchildren growing up in Knoxville. Life was busy and often flat-out exhausting, but I wanted a better future, for me and for my family, and I wanted it badly.
It was on one of those long days on the road that I first saw the billboard for the Tennessee Reconnect program. Reconnect was a grant built for adults like me, people who hadn't had steady access to higher education because of work, money, or family, but who were ready to go back. Fully covered tuition for an associate degree or a certificate. That was exactly the door I'd been waiting on.
I enrolled eagerly and transferred in all the credits I'd already earned at the University of Tennessee and Ozarks Technical Community College, which let me jump straight into Pellissippi State Community College's Civil Engineering Technology program. I pushed to get everything I could out of it, adding two certificates, Construction Management and Sustainability and Design, to make the most of the grant.
Balancing school, work, and family was anything but easy. I kept working as a maintenance technician across properties including Cherokee Mills. I chased project management jobs too, and took a few rejections, from Green Home and from McCracken Construction, before I finally landed a Project Manager role at ForeMost Construction. For about six months I even moonlighted as a Starbucks barista to keep it all afloat. All the while I was splitting my time between a child out of state and stepchildren at home. Some stretches felt like one long juggling act.
Through sheer stubborn effort, I not only finished the degree, I graduated Summa Cum Laude with a perfect 4.0. I could never have done it without my wife, Sarah, who carried me through the long nights of studying and the long days of work.
At Pellissippi I got deep into civil engineering and construction technology. I learned surveying, AutoCAD, Revit, and Autodesk Civil 3D, and got hands-on with materials testing, estimating, HVAC, and electrical design. Just as important, I came to understand sustainable construction and low-carbon building, digging into Project Drawdown and the heavy footprint the construction industry leaves on the planet. I saw how smart design and careful material choices can cut emissions and make the buildings we put up part of the solution instead of the problem.
Looking back, Pellissippi State wasn't only about earning a degree. It was about proving to myself that I could rise above my circumstances. It taught me resilience, resourcefulness, and the value of grabbing an opportunity no matter how late it seems to show up. That chapter still reminds me that with determination, a little support, and access to the right resources, a person can change their circumstances and reshape their future for the better.
Turning Around Cherokee Mills: My Autobiographical Story
When I joined Commercial and Investment Properties in Knoxville, Tennessee, they handed me an unusual responsibility: I was the sole maintenance technician for Cherokee Mills, a 100-year-old textile mill that had been turned into roughly 250,000 square feet of commercial office space. At any given time the building held more than 22 tenants, from medical offices and accounting firms to architectural practices, a restaurant, a software company, and an insurance agency. I was, in a real sense, the building's caretaker, problem-solver, and engineer all in one.
Cherokee Mills had character, and it carried the weight of decades of neglect right along with it. The mill had been built in stages, so no two areas were quite alike. The roofs alone were a study in it: metal, membrane, and pitched, each with its own quirks and its own leaks. The floors changed as much as the roofs did, and just about every system told a story of piecemeal fixes over the years. My first months were spent bringing order to the chaos, clearing out storage rooms and closets, cataloging keys and locks, and mapping the whole building in AutoCAD so I could actually find the drains, the plumbing, and the low-voltage lines.
Day to day, the work was part routine maintenance and part invention. I supervised subcontractors and general contractors through tenant build-outs, making sure each space came together cleanly and safely. I converted the building's lighting to LED, modernized the elevator phones to digital low-voltage systems, and spent nights on fire watch while we upgraded the sprinkler system. There were stretches where I felt more like a building engineer than a maintenance tech, running HVAC troubleshooting, electrical repairs, and fire-system work, usually after hours or on weekends so the tenants never felt it.
For two years I poured myself into Cherokee Mills. I took pride not just in fixing what broke, but in giving the old place a genuine facelift and setting up a maintenance system that would hold. The tenants came to trust me, and the relationships I built with subcontractors paid off on the bigger jobs. Bit by bit, the mill went from a neglected building to a polished, fully working hub of business.
Balancing the job with school was demanding, and as graduation neared, I could feel my ambitions turning toward project and construction management. Commercial and Investment Properties was a small company with little room past maintenance, and they were getting ready to sell Cherokee Mills. It felt like the right time to move on, though leaving was bittersweet. My two-week notice got emotional for all of us. The property manager especially let me know how much the energy I'd put into that building had meant.
Looking back, Cherokee Mills was far more than a job. It was a hands-on education in building systems, tenant relations, and creative problem-solving. I left knowing I'd made a real difference, breathing new life into a century-old building and sharpening the skills that would carry me into the next stage of my career.
McCracken Construction: Lessons in Ethics and Professional Standards
My time at McCracken Construction and Maintenance Company in Maryville, Tennessee, gave me an eye-opening look at how much ethics and professional standards matter in construction. I came on as an estimator, eager to get to work and sharpen my skills in design and planning. Early on I was drawing up plans to improve an ADA ramp at one of the company's commercial properties and working on the new Midland Shopping Center, which was the company's main local focus. My office sat in a converted storage business that also ran alongside a liquor store and a sub sandwich shop, both company-owned.
As I settled in, I started noticing things that raised serious red flags. The company was operating without a contractor's license, taking on construction across multiple states, and often doing it without the proper permits. At one point, after a fire at the sandwich shop, I was asked to go retrieve metal shopping-cart corrals from a local business that was closing down, a request that felt an awful lot like larceny. The office itself was no better, full of vulgar language, locker-room talk, and behavior that made the place unprofessional and uncomfortable to be in.
The CEO kept an apartment inside the storage-unit business and would sometimes hold meetings there, which only added to the strangeness of an already uncomfortable situation. Between the missing license, the expectation that I'd take part in things I wanted no part of, and the culture in that office, it became clear this was not a place where I could build a career or keep myself safe doing it.
In the end I made the hard but necessary call to resign on short notice. I wasn't going to gamble my own integrity, and I wasn't going to be on the hook for the company's choices. Leaving McCracken taught me lasting lessons about leadership, accountability, and the non-negotiable place ethics hold in any business. I've carried those lessons with me ever since, and I look for work where integrity and professionalism sit at the center of everything.
Green Home Installations: Resourcefulness Under Pressure
My first day at Green Home Installations set the tone for the whole run. When I showed up, nobody seemed to know I was starting. No desk, no computer, no clear sense of what I was supposed to be doing. The title said "Project Manager," which sounds like leadership and organization. The reality was nothing like that.
In those early weeks I learned fast that resourcefulness was the only skill that really mattered. Instead of managing projects, I spent most days driving long stretches between job sites, making sure materials got delivered and work kept moving. Project managers were expected to use their own vehicles and their own tools, and gas reimbursement came slow and complicated. Even getting basic materials was a fight, between failing company cards and slow approvals. Every day called for improvising.
Even so, I gave it everything I had. The job often turned into straight manual labor: laying glass blocks, doing electrical work, digging trenches, and taking on whatever hands-on project came up, usually learning as I went. Word on the schedule was scarce. A lot of the time I only found out the next day's assignments from a late-night group text from the owner. A disorganized place like that demands constant flexibility and a good attitude just to keep the projects and the customers on track.
Staying professional was everything. The company leaned on subcontractors and a borrowed contractor's license, which made permitting and client trust harder than they should have been. I made it my job to keep everyone informed and as satisfied as I could, even when the circumstances were less than ideal. Communication became my anchor.
It ended out of nowhere. I was on a family vacation when I got the call telling me I'd been let go. Sudden as it was, the season taught me real lessons about resilience, about what structured leadership is worth, and about staying adaptable when the ground keeps shifting under you.
Looking back, Green Home was unpredictable from day one, a run of hard lessons, unexpected jobs, and personal growth that still shapes how I approach every project and every team.
ForeMost Construction: Award-Winning Projects & Process Improvement
I started at ForeMost Construction as a project manager and jumped straight into five major projects. ForeMost built upscale vacation cabins across the Smoky Mountain region, along with large custom homes and the occasional light commercial job. My role mixed hands-on construction with the administrative side. I spent a lot of time preparing estimates, reviewing blueprints, gathering subcontractor proposals, and coordinating with contractors to keep everything moving.
One of the highlights of my time there was managing a luxury vacation cabin that went on to win an award from a regional architecture and design magazine. That one meant a lot, because I'd had a hand in every step of the build, from coordinating materials and subcontractors to the finishing details that gave the cabin its look and feel. Seeing the work recognized in public reinforced the pride I take in good craftsmanship and a happy customer.
Alongside the day-to-day of visiting job sites, managing subcontractors, scheduling deliveries, and handling warranty work, I set out to improve how the company ran on the inside. During my time there, ForeMost switched to new project management and estimating software. Seeing that we needed a clear way to onboard and stay consistent, I suggested building a visual workflow to make training easier and keep our practices the same across the board. I designed and put in place a detailed flowchart that mapped every step of the construction and administrative process, and it became a tool the team leaned on as the company grew.
With my own tools, and eventually a company truck, I often stepped in for the hands-on work: carpentry, installing big glass shower doors, or chasing down an urgent electrical or plumbing problem on-site. Beyond the tools, I put a lot of weight on customer relations, keeping homeowners, neighbors, and nearby businesses in the loop and satisfied all the way through construction. My work also included pulling permits, staying on top of code compliance, and keeping every stakeholder rowing in the same direction.
This role let me put both my certified construction management training and my practical problem-solving to real use, working across nearly every part of the building process. When I finally left ForeMost, it was on excellent terms after working through my two-week notice. I moved to North Carolina to be closer to my teenage son and to take on a new opportunity with A&D Precast, carrying everything I'd learned at ForeMost right along with me.
My Experience at A & D Precast
When I first interviewed with A & D Precast, they told me they were a vertically integrated company and that my role as Account Manager would involve creating shop drawings in AutoCAD Inventor along with handling estimates and takeoffs. They offered to cover my relocation, and I was glad to join a company with decades of experience in the niche world of architectural precast concrete.
From my first day, I saw that "vertical integration" meant something particular there: everybody wore a lot of hats. The designers were also salespeople, handled their own paperwork, and ran their own projects. The company had been around for nearly 30 years, but operations were disorganized and short on reliable systems. There was no clear tracking of quotes against sales, no accurate cost-of-goods numbers, and no real analytics to steer decisions.
Over time, I worked to bring some order to it. I built tools to estimate our cost per pound of product, which let me figure margins and track KPIs like pipeline value. I also got to know the company's patchwork of technology, which ran on spreadsheets, CSV files, and macros. Efforts to bring in software, things like Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Idencia for production tracking, never took hold, so much of the process stayed manual and unreliable.
On my own time, I dug into better solutions. I went to an industry trade show and looked at the software built for architectural precast, and most of it was either dated or not enough. So I started building my own database and workflow tools to automate the process and tighten things up. After a year, I brought the company a full proposal to improve operations: define real roles, build a cohesive team, put better technology in place, and create career paths to keep good people. I even offered a profit-sharing model for a system I'd developed independently, to help the company scale.
My vision for growth didn't line up with the direction the company wanted to go. Not long after I turned in the proposal, I was let go, and it caught me off guard. It stung, but the experience gave me real insight into running complex operations, building business analytics, and solving problems for a niche manufacturing industry. My time at A & D Precast only deepened my drive for process improvement and systems that scale, and the lessons I took from it still shape how I work today.
My Journey to Creating DhyanaTech Inc.
I never set out to become a business owner, let alone a software developer. But the trouble I kept running into across my career sparked something deeper: a want to build tools that actually serve people instead of fighting them.
It started with what I saw again and again in construction and manufacturing: chaos everywhere. Critical data scattered across a dozen spreadsheets, half of it missing or out of date. When a spreadsheet got too big, somebody spun up a new one, and every new one was a fresh place for errors to hide. Moving CSV files around by hand with macros was a daily headache. Companies would reach for Microsoft 365 Power Apps, Dynamics, and off-the-shelf SaaS, and after years of work with outside developers, none of it would stick. The industry was using the wrong tools for the job.
I used to joke, "If I had the time, I could just build the software myself." At some point the joke turned into a plan. On my own time, nights and weekends and holidays, I built a fully working mini-ERP prototype from scratch as an independent project. In eight months I had a real system, with RFID tag tracking, Zebra label printer integration, and automated workflows that did away with all that manual CSV shuffling. It came straight out of necessity, and it proved the gap in the industry was real.
But I knew technical skill alone wouldn't carry a product to market. So I built MyTinyCEO, a tool for market research, financial modeling, and putting together investor materials for my own venture. It helped me get my arms around the business side and sharpen my strategy.
Working on both of those projects, I noticed something. The way I built software was different from most of what I'd seen in the industry. I wasn't trying to cram in features, I was trying to take friction out. Too much software gets built without a purpose, piling on complexity where what people need is clarity.
This lined up with a change in my own life. I'd been practicing mindfulness, learning to slow down and pay attention to what actually matters. And I started to see that the stress of chaotic work systems wasn't only an operations problem, it was a wellbeing problem. The noise and friction of badly designed tools wear on more than productivity. They wear on people.
That's when DhyanaTech Inc. was born. The name comes from "Dhyana," the Sanskrit word for meditation, a state of focused awareness and calm. I founded DhyanaTech to build technology more mindfully: tools that let people work with less friction and less stress, so they have more time and energy left for the parts of life that happen outside of work.
Those early independent projects became the foundation of the DhyanaTech ecosystem. The manufacturing prototype grew into DhyanaERP, a full manufacturing ERP with a vertical edition for precast concrete manufacturers, alongside DhyanaPM for project management, DhyanaCFO for financial clarity, and DhyanaCEO for business planning. Every product leans the same way: simplicity over complexity, purpose over feature bloat.
Building DhyanaTech has forced me to grow as a leader. I've had to learn entrepreneurship, finance, marketing, HR, compliance, and team-building, what it really means to be a CEO. My aim is to give small businesses tools that simplify their operations, sharpen their efficiency, and, in some small way, help build a healthier and more focused world of work.
Everything I've picked up along the way, from coding and AI to leadership and mindfulness, has shaped DhyanaTech Inc. The journey is still early, but I believe the tools I'm building can change how people experience their work, and through it, their lives.