Diverse Career

People sometimes look at my experience and ask why it's so diverse. Different industries. Different environments. Different stages of company growth. DTC. Foodservice. CPG. Startups. Scaling businesses. Turnarounds. 3PL. Sales. Marketing.

When asked why or how it became that diverse- the answer is that someone needs to fill the gaps - that's usually me.

Because operations is where everything lands. And I mean everything. Sales overpromises - operations absorbs it. Marketing launches a campaign without telling anyone - operations responds to the spike. Finance cuts headcount in the wrong place - operations covers the gap. A new initiative gets announced without an execution plan - operations builds one. An audit takes place - operations leads it. H.R. has a new initiative - operations is responsible for it. Usually without additional resources. Usually while still running everything else.

I didn't plan a diverse career. I built one by repeatedly being the person in the room who figured it out when nobody else had a plan for what just landed.

That exposure is irreplaceable. I've stood on warehouse floors and in boardrooms. I've negotiated hundred million dollar contracts and presented to investors. I've built teams from scratch and inherited ones that needed rebuilding. I've launched operations, turned around broken ones, and scaled ones that had outgrown their own infrastructure.

Every environment taught me something the last one couldn't. Cold chain taught me precision. Startups taught me resourcefulness. Scaling businesses taught me that growth without infrastructure is just organized chaos with better revenue. Large established companies taught me that size didn't equal speed or innovation.

And every single time - operations was where the real work lived. Where the decisions made in other departments became someone else's reality to execute.

That's not a complaint. That's the education. Because the person who has absorbed that overflow - who has been handed the commitment nobody asked them about and figured out how to keep it anyway - that person develops something you can't teach in a classroom. Pattern recognition. Adaptability. The ability to walk into any environment and find the signal in the noise.

That's why my background looks the way it does. Not because I couldn't stay in one lane. Because operations kept expanding the road.

I hope that when you are presented with the opportunity that you take the ground!