About Me
After a 30-year career in strategy and finance, I retired from corporate life to explore life at sea aboard Indiscretion, an ocean-going Nordhavn 43 trawler we kept at Shilshole Marina in Seattle. After our son passed away in a motorcycle accident in 2022, we relocated to Arizona to bring us closer to our daughter in Los Angeles and allow us to explore the parts of the country we couldn’t reach by boat.
Professionally, I manage an investment portfolio of both established publicly-traded companies and index funds, as well as seek out investments in emerging businesses with unique value propositions and talented teams.
I served the majority of my professional career as the head of strategy for TrueBlue, a publicly traded multi-billion industrial staffing and recruitment process outsourcing firm. I helped grow this business from a regional provider of on-demand labor to one of the largest human capital firms in the world with operations in more than 60 countries. I completed more than twenty acquisitions of other staffing firms during my tenure which now represent more than 70% of TrueBlue’s revenue and profit. It was a privilege to help connect over a million people with jobs over the course of my 24-year career.
Before TrueBlue, I served clients in public accounting in Seattle and New York for BDO, an international public accounting firm.
I earned my undergraduate degree in Accounting from Western Washington University and my MBA from Arizona State University. For thirty years, I was a licensed Certified Public Accountant in the state of Washington (now retired).
About this Blog
This blog emerged from years of journal writing. I’ve kept a journal for most of my life and have written many thousands of entries — more than a million words so far — making these private musings equivalent to the length of War and Peace and Anna Karenina combined. Unlike the genius of Tolstoy, the vast majority of my journal writing is pretty awful. All those years of accounting and finance sapped my writing spirit, with constant urging to replace metaphors and similes with bullet points and jargon in stiffly written memos. And PowerPoint. Lots of PowerPoint. It’s a curse of the trade.
Nine years ago, right before I turned 50, I took a year-long sabbatical away from work. I squeezed a lot of memorable experiences into those 12 months that I could never have accomplished while tied to an office: I taught my daughter to drive here on the country roads of Vashon Island. I built a go-kart from scratch with my son and coached his robotics team. I learned to cook. I spent the whole summer traveling with my family through Europe. I connected with friends. I read a lot of books. I became the person I imagined I’d be when I was younger.
In the middle of this sabbatical, I noticed a change in the quality and tone of my journal writing. As the creative asphyxiation from corporate non-speak wore off, a new voice emerged from my pen that captured the life around me with more vividness and clarity. I began looking at the world like a writer might. I recall a feeling of euphoria after finishing an essay about our family’s time in Spain. I had never written anything so good, and it made me feel optimistic and excited that a real writer might yet exist somewhere inside me. I posted Valencia of Childhood Dreams here on this blog as my first public essay.
I’m using this platform to share ideas and experiences that I believe could help others who might be on a similar path. I believe deeply that making a difference in the lives of others is an important purpose in life, and I hope these infrequent posts can help, even in a small way.
