Knowing what to build and why it matters is the real skill.

The Situation

The company was growing steadily in staff count, client count, and the diversity of work we were taking on. The natural response would have been to hire more operational support as that growth continued, but I saw a different path forward.

The Strategic Insight

I brought a proposal to the CEO, COO, and CPO: instead of hiring to keep pace with growth, we should invest in building automated operational infrastructure ahead of the demand. Rather than starting broad, we began with a focused experiment around asset monitoring and management. The ability to gather data across multiple systems and present it in one place gave leadership something they hadn't had before: the visibility to review what was happening, react to emerging issues, and forecast what was coming. KPI reporting that used to take fifteen to twenty hours a week across multiple systems came down to about an hour and a half.

Building Adoption

All three signed off on the experiment. Once the results from that initial system were clear, we expanded the approach systematically across finance, HR, project delivery, and company-wide reporting. Each new system followed the same model: identify the pain, build the infrastructure, train the team, iterate based on their feedback.

The Situation

When I arrived at RoleModel, every employee had a company credit card, but there was no real system behind it. People were sending photos of receipts over email, forwarding invoices to our accounting manager, and she was spending a significant amount of her time just hunting down information she should have been receiving automatically. We had no procurement solution and no connection between expense tracking and our bookkeeping.

The Strategic Insight

The real problem wasn't that the process was inefficient. It was that a great employee was spending her time on low-value work that could have been handled by a proper system. I researched the full landscape of expense management platforms, evaluated the options against our specific needs, and recommended Ramp to the C-suite as the right fit.

Building Adoption

When we first told the staff about the change, the immediate response was "Why can't we just keep sending our invoices to Lui?" Rather than mandating compliance, I sat with each person and showed them the multiple ways they could handle their expenses within the new system. I walked them through how it actually made their day-to-day work simpler, and I made sure they understood the advantages of having a real system in place to manage this part of the business. Once they saw it in practice, they all got it.

The Situation

The company's benefits package had become a strategic liability. We had a low 401(k) match, employees were funding most of their own healthcare coverage, and the ancillary benefits were limited. This wasn't just an HR administration issue. It was a recruitment and retention risk that could quietly constrain the company's ability to grow and attract the right people.

The Strategic Insight

I recognized that compensation structure sends a signal to the market about what kind of company you are, and the signal we were sending wasn't aligned with the caliber of team we wanted to build. I made the case for a comprehensive overhaul, treating it as a business-level investment rather than a cost to be managed.

Building Adoption

I designed and implemented a first-class total rewards package from the ground up: comprehensive healthcare coverage, a full suite of ancillary benefits, a meaningfully stronger 401(k) match, and a matured plan structure that moved us from an informal arrangement to a fully compliant Safe Harbor plan. Each piece was rolled out with clear communication about what was changing and why it mattered.

The Situation

Generating each new employee contract took four to five days, moving through manual drafting, review, and back and forth before anything was ready to sign. That lag slowed down hiring and onboarding at exactly the moments speed mattered most.

The Strategic Insight

I saw an opportunity to apply AI directly to a process that was still fundamentally manual. Rather than just formatting a template faster, I built a system that generated accurate, compliant contracts from structured inputs, and I built in the checks needed to safeguard data integrity so the speed never came at the cost of accuracy.

Building Adoption

I rolled the system out gradually, starting with a small set of contract types and walking HR through exactly how the generated documents were built and reviewed before anyone signed off. Once they saw the output matched what they would have drafted by hand, just faster, trust in the system came quickly.

The Situation

Payroll took a full workday to process by hand. FP and A reporting took several days to assemble each cycle. Invoicing was a four to six hour paper process that ran through multiple people before a single invoice went out. None of it was broken exactly, but all of it was manual, and all of it was quietly consuming the week.

The Strategic Insight

I didn't want to fix these one at a time as isolated annoyances. I treated payroll, FP and A, and invoicing as a single back-office system that needed to be rebuilt around automation rather than patched piece by piece, using the same custom tooling approach I was already applying elsewhere in the business.

Building Adoption

I built and rolled out each piece deliberately, payroll first since it touched every employee, then FP and A, then invoicing, checking in with the people who depended on each report or paycheck to make sure the new process actually served them before moving to the next system.

The Situation

While completing my MBA, I managed facilities for a 22,000 square foot church building and 5.71 acres of grounds, part time, alongside a rebrand campaign the church had already committed to and a building that hadn't been meaningfully updated in years.

The Strategic Insight

When COVID hit, the standard response would have been to stop meeting entirely. I saw a path to keep the congregation together safely by building outdoor meeting space, and I treated the rebrand and infrastructure upgrades as work that needed to continue rather than pause.

Building Adoption

I managed the full building repaint and signage refresh, including a pop-up signage system still in use today, coordinated an HVAC vendor change and full system overhaul, and upgraded the building to LED lighting throughout, all while standing up the outdoor space that let services continue during COVID.

The Situation

Ada Marketing was growing quickly, but the operational backbone hadn't caught up. Fulfillment was moving 10 to 12 orders a day with no standard procedures and no tracking, and customer support ran through a single channel, email, with no CRM behind it.

The Strategic Insight

Growth was going to keep coming whether or not the infrastructure was ready for it, so I focused on building the SOPs, tracking, and customer systems the business would need before the volume made the gaps impossible to ignore.

Building Adoption

I authored the standard operating procedures fulfillment would run on, implemented tracking metrics that are still in use today, and rolled out a CRM alongside expanded customer channels, phone, email, chat, and social media, so customers could reach us however was easiest for them.

The Situation

I inherited an athletic training program that was operating out of a 120 square foot closet with a single treatment table and one modality. There were no documentation standards, no budget, no medical team, and no real plan for how any of that would change.

The Strategic Insight

I treated the program the same way I'd later treat operations at a software company: find what's genuinely missing, build the infrastructure to support it, and make the case to the people who control the resources. That meant building documentation and treatment standards from scratch and making the budget case to the county directly, since no one had ever asked before.

Building Adoption

I recruited an in-house physician, an orthopedics team, and rehab specialists to build out real medical coverage, and I brought Campbell University's Athletic Training program in as a partner, serving as a preceptor and mentor for their students. Each addition made the case for the next one.