The breadth is the point. Few advisors have stood in as many different rooms — and fewer still can tell you what each one taught them.
I grew up in Chicago, the son of parents who divorced early. By God's grace, through a steady diet of sports and music, I stayed off the streets that pulled in a lot of the kids I knew. I was a gymnast, and I started coaching almost as soon as I was able, mostly to pay for my own training. I learned young that I really enjoyed helping people reach their potential.
At the University of Iowa I initially pursued jazz and engineering — before I quickly admitted the truth: I belonged in rooms with people, not behind a desk. I graduated with honors in Sport Science & Business, paid my way with a string of jobs, played jazz piano on weekends, and spent years as a resident assistant learning the strange art of leading among peers.
Coaching brought me to Colorado Springs in 1997, and with it my first connection to the U.S. Olympic movement. I found a church home almost immediately and joined the worship team, and I served a couple of years as president of the Colorado Gymnastics Coaches Association — another lesson in leading among peers. In 2001 the road bent back toward Chicago, where I came alongside a small but successful gymnastics program and helped it grow well beyond a club: we developed national team members and helped dozens of athletes earn college scholarships. It was there that I met Sheila.
Shortly after we married, a clear call to co-vocational ministry sent me to seminary at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. In 2006 we came back home to Colorado Springs to help re-plant the church I'd first loved.
I spent my first years back in Colorado at the YMCA, where I learned grant acquisition, nonprofit management, and fundraising firsthand. I'd later return to serve as chairman of its board, where we doubled fundraising over two years.
In 2008 I was asked to serve as CEO of the Olympic sport of fencing — a role that combined everything: education, business, and coaching. We led a real turnaround, cutting a massive deficit from running in the red to being fiscally solvent and growing, while also establishing an endowment to protect collegiate fencing. One of the changes I'm proudest of was persuading the organization to reduce its 35-member board to 14 — creating real efficiency, more independent input, and far greater internal trust.
It was during those years that I completed the Olympic Sport Leadership certification through Northwestern's Kellogg School — a hands-on executive program that sharpened the strategy side of everything I did. That work led to an invitation to Harvard's global strategy summit, where leaders from wildly different industries worked through strategic frameworks together.
From there I was asked to serve as chief strategy officer for a DC-based government contracting firm that had begun leveraging its strengths in the sport world. We changed how we approached development, migrated our systems to the cloud for scalability, and grew revenue nearly six-fold in three years.
Upon leaving, I accepted a COO role at a sports-technology startup I had built a relationship with, and helped relocate its headquarters from Australia to the U.S. My experience in both sport and business helped us grow quickly, but I also had to learn what it really takes to raise venture capital: how to rethink a pitch deck, sit across from investors, and secure the strategic partners that make a platform efficient. And I built the systems to align commission-based sales with the engineering teams behind the product — so we could deliver on time and on budget.
The travel, though, was still relentless — and it impeded my ability to lead my family well and shepherd the flock the Lord had called me to as a pastor. So God kindly opened a local door: in 2016 I came home to serve as vice president of marketing and constituent engagement at Focus on the Family — a 110-person division responsible for $65 million in revenue. By getting disciplined about who we served and how, we grew the audience double digits year over year, lifted digital recurring revenue 42%, and added $3.4 million in annual sustainer support.
In 2023, the Lord made it clear it was time to focus on leading pastorally. As I worked through resigning my role at Focus, Dallas Theological Seminary reached out. What began as a short-term engagement has grown into helping them build an existing initiative into a sustainable, highly engaging training experience for churches across a number of denominational groups around the world — work I now lead as executive director of their Story of Scripture Initiative, alongside advising growth and operations at Inspired Learning and walking with the leaders Ascend was built to serve.
But the throughline of all that God has done was never the credentials. It was people — and the patient business of helping them learn, grow, and reach their potential. And by God's grace, Sheila and I have raised five children along the way.