I grew up in Madison, Mississippi. Small town, big family table, the kind of place that taught you early what it looks like when somebody means what they say. That's the part I never let go of, no matter how far the work has taken me.
My first business was a restaurant I started with my grandmother in 2005. Working a kitchen taught me more about leadership in two years than most of the books I've read since. You don't fake your way through a Saturday night dinner rush. The food either goes out or it doesn't, and the people across the counter know the difference.
In 2007 I started a party rental company, grew it for several years, and eventually sold it to a competitor. I stayed on as general manager under a four-year contract afterward and used that runway to learn the unglamorous parts of the work. Payroll, fleet, scheduling, contracts, and the daily math of running a real operation. Most of what I know about leading people I learned in those years. None of it was theoretical.
From there I moved into commercial contracting. We did new-model build-outs and assembly-line maintenance for the Nissan plant. Anytime they changed over their assembly line, my crews bid the work. Painting, integration, install, all kinds of commercial trades inside the plant. Continental Tire was the same kind of relationship. McAlister's and Cinnabon were nationwide digital signage rollouts. The state DMV facilities were where it got interesting, because we ended up automating their ticketing systems. That's the same thread I'm still pulling on today, just with better tools.
Around the same window I built and ran a vending company with more than 1,500 machines deployed across the Southeast, from Texas through Florida. Logistics, route management, restock, repair, and a whole lot of late nights in trucks. It was its own master class in operations.
That's the gap I work in now. Through PointWake, I help business owners document the way they actually work and replace the manual parts with AI-assisted systems. I completed the Post Graduate Program in Generative AI for Business Applications at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin (2025 to 2026). I also worked as a contract AI training data specialist on Mercor's Project Balboa, grading frontier-model outputs at a senior level.
But the through line was never the work. It was always the life behind the work. I met my wife, Audriana, and we built our family in the Texas Hill Country. We raise our boy, Rowdy, in Canyon Lake. On the water as often as the calendar lets us. Around the dinner table the rest of the time. Everything I build is in service of that.
I've made just about every mistake a young operator can make. I've also fixed most of them. That's why I do this work. And why every page of this site is honest about who's behind it.