Herriman, Utah, United States
After a career across two very different industries, lending and consulting, I've learned most businesses are essentially the same. Same basic goals and motivations. Same cast of characters. Same problems. If you understand how they operate, what motivates their people, and can quickly grasp new concepts and subject matter, you can solve their biggest problems, opening doors across varied industries. As a problem solver at heart, I love building teams, systems, and tools that improve how work gets done. Irrespective of rank or role, partnering with others to tackle their most difficult problems is always the best part of my day. Ambition has driven my career from the start. In my early 20s, I built my own mortgage business. I saw this as a chance to grow fast and prove what I could do. The experience eventually parlayed into a senior operations role at a large mortgage lender. 26 years total, 18+ spent in leadership roles across nearly every facet of the business: QC/QA, compliance, loss mitigation, vendor & counterparty relationships, underwriting, closing & funding, loan & servicing rights sales & transfers, BPO engagements, and sales. In 2014, I took a temporary break from for-profit business and moved with my wife and daughters to Ghana. As an in-country co-director, I helped Mercy Project establish its aquaculture program. We worked with low-resourced communities on the shores of Lake Volta to establish cage fishing projects they could maintain themselves. In return, their leaders agreed to stop trafficking children who had been used for subsistence fishing. In early 2023, I joined Fidelis Associates. As VP, my role spans from industrial and capital projects consulting to AI work, including FDE and AI Dev services for internal use and client projects. What's come of the last 3 years? 3x revenue growth at Fidelis. Modernized internal systems that deliver real gains in efficiency and output. Ensured the world's largest hydrogen electrolyzer facility started safely. A book on industrial AI: "Beyond the Buzzwords." A new app to drive hydrogen projects: HPRI. Completion of MIT's No-Code AI & ML program. Certifications in spec-driven development and cloud computing. Many new friends made along the way. 2025-26 brought big gains in AI capabilities. Ideas and plans that recently seemed impossible are now well within reach. I take advantage of this and build every single day. If you work in industrial settings, tech, or finance, message me. I read what comes in and genuinely appreciate each chance to learn, be a resource, and problem solve.
I run a professional services firm that helps clients solve their toughest and most complex operational problems. Company revenue doubled in my first year and tripled by the end of year two. Our clients are varied and include EPCs, refiners, operators, and startups developing novel technologies. We support their needs in maintenance & reliability, mechanical & asset integrity, PSM, PSSRs, and HSE, among other areas. Though I joined Fidelis without direct experience in these disciplines, a genuine love for learning and a broad background afforded me the experiences needed to develop the kind of sharp instinct the work demands. AI grabbed my imagination three years ago. I've come to see it as the ultimate multiplier and enabler, making work possible that simply wasn't within reach before. Making it useful required proficiency in a whole new set of tools. I don't even have a software background, but I've learned to build. Talking to ChatGPT hardly scratches the surface. I've spent thousands of hours learning and building, and the investment has more than paid off. At times, I feel like a superhero. If I can think it, I can build it. There are real risks with new technologies, but with proper guardrails the net is hugely positive. In my book Beyond the Buzzwords, I argue that the right AI solution looks nothing like what most software vendors are selling. Their generalist AI products are the digital equivalent of square pegs forced into round holes, built on hype to deliver returns to investors, not real value to their clients. They don't solve real-world problems. My work runs the other direction: small, fit-for-purpose tools that solve one specific problem at a time. I've used AI to support our consulting engagements, built tools using AI as a coding partner, and developed tools that themselves run on AI. I love sharing what I've learned, and Fidelis now offers AI consulting as a service.
I started at Direct Mortgage as an Account Executive and stayed eighteen years, moving up through Operations Manager, Underwriting Manager, and Quality Control Manager to VP of Retail Operations and Quality Control. As an AE I built a new wholesale territory from zero, and it grew faster than any the company had opened before. Later I helped launch a new retail lending division that scaled from zero to $40 million in volume and became the company's most profitable unit. The stretch I think about most is 2008. In the run-up, I pushed to tighten our credit policy and stop writing the riskiest loans, the stated-income and investment-property products that were still profitable for everyone else at the time. It was an unpopular call with our account executives and brokers, and I held it. The crisis still nearly took the company down, but moving early bought us room we needed to get through. In the years around it, I led the defense against repurchase demands and litigation that put tens of millions of dollars at risk, and I was the operational lead through the regulatory exams and counterparty audits that came with running a lending shop. I wrote the company's quality control program from the ground up and served on the credit policy committee that set and revised our underwriting standards. When we moved part of our underwriting offshore, I ran it as a vendor relationship end to end: defining the SOPs, negotiating terms, executing the agreements, and taking the team from onboarding to steady, reliable underwriting. Mortgage is a long way from the industrial and AI work I do now, but the core problem hasn't changed: build an operation that scales without breaking, run by people and systems you can count on.
At Wells Fargo Home Mortgage, I managed a wholesale (B2B) lending territory, working with smaller mortgage firms that originated first-lien mortgages and HELOCs. As the primary relationship manager in my territory, I was responsible for three things, each related to increasing quality loan volume: adding new business partners, deepening relationships with existing business partners, and holding production to the company's underwriting and delivery standards. It was a short chapter, but it's where I learned prime wholesale lending in practice.
My first role as an account executive was with Accredited Home Lenders. Working in non-prime wholesale mortgage lending was another first. While here, I focused on working with brokers whose borrowers were underserved by traditional banks and other non-bank lenders. Because each deal needed careful structuring just to make it through underwriting, non-prime AEs spent their time very differently than their prime counterparts, often allocating more time to working with operations teams than developing new business. In this niche, growing production was the easy part. These factors resulted in me having the opportunity to learn a lot about credit risk, loan quality, pricing discipline, and underwriting.
I founded and led a successful mortgage company in Utah, overseeing every aspect from inception to daily operations. • Recruited and developed a team of approximately 20 employees within the first year. • Designed and implemented comprehensive training programs to ensure employee success. • Authored and executed all organizational policies and procedures, including HR, accounting, sales, operations, and quality control. • Fostered a performance-driven culture, holding staff accountable for meeting or exceeding monthly loan volume targets to ensure profitability. • Launched targeted sales and marketing initiatives aimed at consumers and building relationships with referral partners.