Professional Life
I am a transformative leader with nearly two decades of experience driving positive change through strategic planning, organizational design, process engineering, and cultural alignment. Most recently, I was the CTO at Splash Financial, a financial education and student loan refinancing company that provides online lending options to help graduates consolidate and refinance their student loan debt. Previously, I led Technology at Wheedle, a marketing platform for restaurants, bars, and event organizers to promote their events; and IT Operations at Veritix, where I built a team that brought scalability and stability to its ticketing platform, enabling single-day sales records and the highest-revenue year in company history.
Prior to Veritix, as VP of Information Technology at Intellicorp, one of the nation’s leading providers of background screening services, I had responsibility for all IT functions, including the application development, testing, and support teams; business analyst and project management group; and build and configuration, infrastructure, and database teams.
Before my decade at Intellicorp, I held positions in software development and system engineering with TekSystems, a global IT staffing agency, CT Logistics, a freight bill processing and logistics company, New Media Communications, a website development firm, and Hiram College, a liberal arts college of approximately 1300 students.
I hold an MBA from the Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western Reserve University.
Professional EXPERIENCE
You can view my up to date accomplishments and work history at LinkedIn, or by downloading my CV (PDF).
Professional Projects
At Scaling Strategy, I write about leadership, mentoring, and intentional change, specifically as relating to high-growth, technology-driven organizations
Creative Life
I come from a family of talented artists and inherited a powerful creative drive. As a result, I write poetry for children and adults and short stories filled with talking cats, horrible monsters, paranormal bloggers, and unlikely bands of heroes. Additionally, I fold origami, do calligraphy, and occasionally draw, paint, and take photographs. Here on the blog, you'll find my reviews of fountain pens, paper, and ink.
I love to cook, eat, and drink so you'll find a few recipes scattered throughout the site as well. If I had the time, I'd write reviews of single malt scotch, craft beer, hot sauces, and loose-leaf tea.
I currently live in Cleveland, OH with my lovely wife, two rambunctious preschoolers, a happy baby, a cat that loves pizza, and a dog named Molly.
Creative Projects
Seize the Dave has been my creative home for many years. Everything that doesn’t fit somewhere else goes here, including speculative fiction, poetry, calligraphy, and ink reviews.
Land of the Crane is home to my feudal Japan-inspired fantasy campaign setting for the world’s greatest role-playing game.
Full Spectrum is a subreddit dedicated to celebrating diversity and inclusion in fantasy, science fiction, and other speculative world building.
Heroic Tales is a genre-neutral role playing game of heroic problem solving. It utilizes a rules-lite, narrative, team-based, scene-level, dice pool challenge resolution system.
A note about reviews
Unless otherwise noted, I have paid for any and all items that I have reviewed out of my own pocket. I will always disclose whether an item has been provided to me for review purposes. I may include links to retailers that I purchase products from, if I feel that the retailer has provided excellent service.