These are not case studies. They are the engagements that shaped how I work.
Every one of them started with the wrong diagnosis. The presenting problem was never the real problem.
Non-profit organizational turnaround — Pacific Northwest
They Knew the Story. They Had Forgotten What It Meant.
A colleague had been asked to build a fundraising plan for a non-profit. Feeling there was a deeper issue, he asked me to join the next meeting. The organization had been founded in the late 1950s by a group of parents whose children with disabilities were turned away by the local school district. The founder opened her own school to prove the kids could be educated and were worth the investment. When the district admitted the kids a few years later, she looked for the next gap and kept serving this population of kids.
When I walked in the door, the organization appeared rudderless. Bank balances were critically low, next steps were unclear, and the board had considered closing its doors the year before.
$100M mechanical contractor, Pacific Northwest
The Owner Knew I Understood His Business. I Hadn't Said a Word About Technology.
A second-generation owner of a $100M mechanical contractor called a trusted contact after two major network outages. Email servers had gone down. Data had been lost. His IT team had spent days recovering. He was starting to believe the entire business was at risk.
When I walked in, the IT Manager was at his wits end. Defeated posture. Doing his best with no operating model and no support structure beneath him.
The network had no redundancy. The team had been buying switches at a local electronics store during outages just to get back online.
We stabilized the architecture in weeks using hardware they already owned — twice what was needed, sitting idle. Then we built a 90-day plan. I put it on a whiteboard: the main office, the cloud, and his construction workers on job sites. I drew a hardhat and tool belt on the workers.
The owner told me later — that's when he knew I understood his business.
IT transformation & operating model build — $90M manufacturer, Pacific Northwest
The Dumpster Was on Fire. Nobody Had Noticed.
A CFO called me after he dismissed his IT Manager. A $12M building remodel was already underway. IT had hard deadlines and no plan to meet them.
What I found when I walked in was worse than a personnel problem.
Vendors were billing for work nobody had verified. A phone system carried $600 a month in charges for numbers nobody used. Every workstation in the building ran through infrastructure that took the whole company down almost every week. One person was quietly keeping everything running. Nobody knew his name.
The CFO didn't call me because IT was broken. He called because he'd stopped getting straight answers about what was actually wrong.
That's usually what the pain is really about.
IT business relationship & demand management — $400M publicly traded manufacturer
He Looked at Everything I'd Built and Asked About Project Due Dates.
I spent three years as a translator between four business divisions and a centralized IT organization at a $400 million publicly traded manufacturing company. Regardless of title, my role centered on translating business needs for IT and decoding IT tech speak for the business.
When I arrived, IT had a process. An intake form. Leadership reviewed submissions, created estimates, and approved work. On paper it functioned. In practice it only captured the large, visible projects with budget line items and executive sponsors. Anything under that threshold was invisible. No process, no tracking, no prioritization. Just whoever knew the right person to call.
I became that connector for the business. And then I built the system so it didn't require me anymore.
If you are tired of scrappy IT, let’s chat.