Building the machine
In 2019 I moved to San Diego to run acquisitions for Whissel Realty's Zillow Offers program. When Zillow shut the program down, the role went with it. That same day I asked to come back the next morning with two people and build inside sales. It worked.
Making inside sales matter meant owning the CRM, the lead rules and how marketing fed the pipeline, and that's how I became COO. For six years I ran the company on EOS as its Integrator, through every stage of growth and into the 2025 merger, which I laid out about eleven months before it went live.
I was early to AI. By 2022 and 2023 I was gathering the company's context so AI could use it, and by 2025 it was part of how our leadership team worked every day.
Outside real estate, I co-founded a beverage startup. Retailers passed on stock that still had well over six months of shelf life, because they wanted more runway on the shelf. Advisors said to sell it to discount stores near cost. We believed in the taste, so we treated it as a marketing budget instead: sold it in six-packs near the cost of fulfillment and made every taster a customer we could reach again.
In 2023 I founded The VA Network, an offshore assistant staffing company, so growing teams could add skilled support without adding local seats. I still run it. If it's ever a fit for a client, I'll say so up front, and it's never part of the deal.
Now I'm bringing that work to other teams, a few at a time, and building ventures of my own.
My goal is to make it so that the system drives the processes and the people drive the systems.