Sacramento sales leader · Commercial executive
Sales leader. Father. Partner. Veteran. Athlete. Writer.
Leadership, to me, is not a title. It is how I carry responsibility for people, decisions, and what happens next.
That standard follows me through work, family, service, training, and every chapter I have had to rebuild.
One standard across a whole life
The settings change. The responsibility does not: create clarity, build capability, protect what matters, and leave something durable behind.
More than two decades learning how people, operations, leadership, and revenue connect.
↓02Partnership, fatherhood, a blended family, and the home and example I am building.
↓03Service, reinvention, discipline, and the experiences that shaped how I carry responsibility.
↓04The same standard across work, family, service, and self-command: strength should create safety.
↓05What I read, why I return to it, and how those questions become writing about a whole life.
↓“The industries changed. The responsibility remained consistent.”
My professional life began in warehouse operations and grew through management, purchasing, customer service, territory development, sales leadership, P&L responsibility, and regional commercial leadership.
The common thread is building: a territory, a team, a leader, a forecasting rhythm, or a system that helps good people make better decisions. I enjoy building more than maintaining.
across operations, sales, and commercial leadership
largest multi-site business unit led
industrial commercial portfolio managed
people led through a multi-level leadership team
What I hope people carry forward
I hope they say I led with humility, expected a great deal, and never confused accountability with control. That I believed in them, helped them believe in themselves, and left them more capable of leading themselves, their work, and eventually other people.
I never wanted a title alone to make people follow me. I wanted to earn their respect by knowing the work, spending time with them in the field, going to bat for them, and being present when the pressure was real. Support should be visible. I wanted people to feel my confidence in them before they had fully found it in themselves.
I hold people to a high standard because I believe they can meet it. The goal is not dependence on my approval or correction. It is to build the judgment, discipline, and self-accountability to lead themselves. I do not play favorites or give top performers a pass. I expect more from them, including helping coach and mentor others, because leadership begins before the title.
People are not tools. They have children, partners, families, interests, and purposes that may exist far beyond the company. Work matters and results matter, but work often provides the stability that lets people live the rest of their lives. I want every person I lead to know that I see their effort, respect their ideas, and understand that their life is bigger than the role.
An open door means little if people are afraid of what happens after they walk through it. I want people to disagree, bring me a better idea, or tell me I missed something without having to protect themselves afterward. Humility means accepting that I will not always know what is right. Leadership means correcting course and respecting the person who helped me see it.
I do not want people to remember only that we hit the number. I want them to remember that they mattered, that the standard was fair, and that their time with me prepared them for whatever came next.
What the work taught me
The résumé gives the chronology. These are the lessons that stayed.
MasterTile · 2003–2009
I moved from the warehouse into management, purchasing, customer service, territory sales, and senior territory leadership. Rebuilding the Bay Area grew annual revenue from roughly $30,000 to more than $1.2 million in the first full year. More important, it taught me how a commercial decision travels through an entire business.
SureWest Communications · 2009–2010
A three-person sales operation grew to approximately forty professionals led through four Sales Managers. Growth made one lesson unavoidable: an organization cannot scale by making one leader the answer to every question.
California Family Fitness · 2014–2020
I led an $18 million business across eight locations and more than ninety people. Budgeting, forecasting, staffing, coaching, customer experience, and revenue stopped looking like separate functions. They were one operating system.
Cogent Solutions & Supplies · 2020–2023
I managed a $40 million industrial portfolio while monthly gross profit increased from approximately $25,000 to $45,000. The work reinforced that healthy growth has to balance customer value, margin, resources, and the durability of the relationship.
Vision Engineering · 2023–2025
I led seven Regional Sales Executives, four Manufacturer Representatives, and a distributor network across seven Western states and Canada. Canada grew 17% and the Pacific Northwest 12% as expectations, planning, coaching, and execution became more consistent.
Partnership
When I picture the life ahead, I do not picture an achievement. I picture a life with her.
With Bri, I know what it feels like to be fully seen and still fully chosen. I do not have to hide the parts of me that hurt, pretend I am never afraid, or confuse strength with silence. I can cry, admit when I am wrong, speak honestly about what I have carried, and remain safe in her love. That kind of safety has changed me.
She pays attention to the pieces of me that could easily be missed. She remembered that Where the Red Fern Grows mattered to me and found me a copy. It was a small gift with a much larger meaning: “I know you. I listen. What formed you matters to me.” She loves me in details, and I never want to become so accustomed to that love that I stop recognizing how rare it is.
We spent more than a year choosing one another across distance before blending our lives and families in California. Love had to become action: patience, difficult conversations, long separations, and the repeated decision that the future we wanted was worth building. Now we share the ordinary life—work, school, appointments, meals, training, laughter, a rescue dog, a cat, and schedules that rarely cooperate. I do not take that ordinary life for granted. It is the life I wanted with the woman I love.
Bri is not simply beside me while I become a better man. Loving her is part of what calls that man forward. She has made me more open, more honest, more tender, and more deliberate about how I show up at home. I want her to feel as seen, protected, respected, desired, and chosen as she makes me feel. Whatever else I build in this life, the love and home we are building together will remain among the things that matter most to me.
Fatherhood
I am a father of three and part of a blended family. There is no title I carry more seriously and no love in my life that asks more of me. My children do not live at the edge of my ambitions. They are at the center of why any of it matters.
When they are grown, I hope they remember more than what I provided or the rules I enforced. I want them to remember how it felt to be my child: safe, wanted, protected, known, and free to have a childhood. I want them to remember discipline without humiliation, accountability with grace, laughter in the middle of hard seasons, and a father who knew when to push them and when to sit beside them.
I never want shame or fear to make them face something alone. They may know that a choice will have consequences, but when life becomes frightening or they have made a mistake they cannot undo, I want the instinct beneath every other instinct to be: “Call Dad. Tell him the truth. He will come. We will figure it out together.” I want them to know that access to my love is never something they can lose.
More than success, I want each of my children to know their own worth. I want them to feel, deep in themselves, that they are lovable before they perform, valuable before anyone chooses them, and strong enough to become who they actually are. I want my daughters to recognize the way a man should cherish and respect them because they watched me live it. I want my son to understand that manhood is not dominance or distance; it is presence, responsibility, tenderness, restraint, and showing up again and again.
I cannot protect them from every wound, make every decision for them, or ask them to become versions of me. My responsibility is to give them roots strong enough to feel secure and room wide enough to become themselves. Fatherhood is the daily promise that while their lives belong to them, they will never have to wonder whether their father belongs to them too.
I would give my life for my children without hesitation. The harder promise is to keep living for them—to heal, grow, carry my own crosses, and make sure the burdens and trauma handed to me do not become theirs.
Each chapter changed what responsibility meant to me—and what I believed I could ask of myself next.
U.S. Navy veteran
Before 9/11, military service had never been part of my plan. After the attacks, I felt called to protect my homeland and the people I loved, so I enlisted in the United States Navy. Signing that blank check—up to and including my life—made service real. The Navy taught me discipline, trust, interdependence, and leadership under pressure. Leadership was no longer a title. It was accepting responsibility when the stakes were real.
105 pounds
At 27, I weighed 270 pounds, smoked a pack a day, drank too much, and faced alarming health results. My doctor warned that I might not live to 45 if I did not change. I thought about walking my daughter down the aisle and seeing who she became. I threw away the cigarettes, stopped drinking, and lost 105 pounds in eight months. It was not about appearance. It was a decision to be here.
B.S. · 3.76 GPA
After losing the weight, I wanted to help others change their lives. A certification did not feel sufficient if I was going to put my name on that work. While working and raising a family, I completed an accelerated bachelor’s degree in Exercise Science and Professional Training with a 3.76 GPA and made the Dean’s List every semester. Becoming the first person in my family to earn a degree mattered, but the deeper lesson was integrity: if my name is attached to something, I need to earn the right to do it.
Ironman finisher
I chose an Ironman because I hated cardio and running, had never ridden a road bike on the road, and could not freestyle swim. Training meant learning from zero and doing the work after novelty disappeared—often alone, whenever life left room. I finished because I had decided I would. Then I judged my time instead of honoring the finish. That revealed both sides of my standards: they make difficult things possible, but they can also keep me from recognizing what the work already proved.
“When somebody is invested in you, it makes you try harder.”From my 2019 Bryan University alumni story ↗
The moments beneath the milestones
The facts tell you what happened. The moments show you what stayed.
Grandpa Bruce · The name I carry
I am named after him. I carry his name, his lessons, and an obligation to honor both in the way I live.
I changed schools thirteen times while I was growing up—sometimes returning to one I had attended before. Through all of that movement, my Grandpa Bruce and Grandma Sally’s house was the constant. So was he: grounded, dependable, and the same man regardless of what was happening around him. He showed me that command presence does not come from being loud. He earned respect through composure, capability, work, and the way he cared for his family.
When I was a boy, I shot a blue jay with a BB gun. He made me retrieve it, taught me how to prepare it, and had me eat it. The lesson was larger than waste: understand your place in nature and accept responsibility for what you take. The bird did not lose its value because we disliked its nature. I carried that beyond the yard—something, or someone, does not become disposable because it is difficult to understand or love.
I never heard him say, “I can’t.” If he did not know how, he learned until he could do it well. A master welder, mechanic, and fisherman, he taught me that “I don’t know how” is not a limitation. It is the beginning of the work.
The stability I want my children to feel, the self-command I expect from myself, and my belief that I can learn through hard things all bear his fingerprints. I walk every step with the honor of carrying his name. I carry him with me, and I carry his lessons.
Stockton to Sacramento · Peace
“Man, Dad, we ain’t got nothing.”
I was seven or eight when my dad ended a relationship and nearly everything in the house left with her. White walls. Dark carpet. A chandelier over the empty space where the table had been. There was nothing in the kitchen, not even a fork. It was me, my dad, and our Doberman, Sampson.
We sat on the carpet and took it in. I said, “Man, Dad, we ain’t got nothing.” He was exhausted, but I never felt fear from him. He answered, “We have peace, son, and you can’t put a price on that.”
I understood him years later, after leaving a life defined by tension and waking in a home that felt peaceful. The ordinary details felt sacred because the anxiety was gone. Peace is not what remains after you have everything. Sometimes it is the thing that makes rebuilding possible.
I believe strength carries an obligation: protect without controlling, hold a standard without humiliating, remain composed without becoming emotionally absent, and make it safer for other people to tell the truth.
That is the leadership standard I want at work and at home. Check the ego. Apologize when wrong. Earn respect instead of enforcing fear. Accept responsibility for the example your presence sets.
A man is not defined by how much fear he can create. He is defined by how much safety his presence creates.
Stand on principle. Protect your family. Stay composed when circumstances are not. Let your actions carry the weight of what you believe.
Say the love out loud. Apologize when you are wrong. Let the people closest to you see your humanity without asking them to carry your emotional responsibility.
A home, a relationship, and a leadership environment where people feel safe, respected, clear about what matters, and able to become more fully themselves.
Endurance taught me to keep going alone through work I disliked. Combat sports teach me how to stay present under pressure, manage emotion, trust a training partner, accept immediate feedback, and improve without ego.
Real confidence is quiet. It gives me nothing to prove and every reason to stay composed.
I have always been physical and competitive. Over the years, I have trained across striking, grappling, and self-defense disciplines, and I recently began boxing. What keeps me returning is the combination of timing, awareness, adaptability, discipline, and honest feedback. You cannot bluff your way through it.
Sparring is built on mutual trust. Both people agree to challenge one another within clear rules, coaching, and control, then walk away helping each other improve. It teaches me to remain clear while uncomfortable, regulate my response, and respect the person across from me. Those lessons carry far beyond the gym.
Training has made me calmer, not more confrontational. It gives intensity a disciplined place, replaces posturing with quiet confidence, and reinforces that composure is a choice—even when adrenaline is high.
Honor, respect, restraint, endurance, and camaraderie are the standard. I do not train to dominate people; I train to improve, stay composed, and master myself.
Boxing is fun, new, and different from everything I have trained before. Years in other disciplines do not let me skip the basics. Footwork, distance, timing, defense, and combinations have to be learned on boxing’s terms. I like being experienced enough to respect the work and humble enough to begin again.
What the library reveals
Across more than two hundred audiobooks and the physical books I have kept, I do not follow one school of thought. I move between psychology, philosophy, leadership, masculinity, spirituality, health, endurance, relationships, survival, sales, and fiction. The range is the point. I am less interested in joining a doctrine than in testing ideas against one another and against my own life.
Psychology, emotional intelligence, relationships, trauma, fear, boundaries, and communication keep returning me to the same question: what is happening beneath the surface, especially when pressure exposes the distance between what people say and what they carry?
Stoicism, ethics, spirituality, resilience, endurance, survival, and masculinity are different traditions asking related questions: What deserves my effort? What do I control? What do I owe other people? What kind of man am I becoming through the choices I repeat?
Sales, leadership, communication, systems, and decision-making are not a separate business shelf. They reflect the same instinct I bring to training, family, and rebuilding: if my name is attached to the work, I want to understand the craft and practice it with integrity.
I read a great deal of psychological fiction, crime, and mystery. Motive is rarely simple in those stories. They let me think about fear, loyalty, secrecy, consequence, and the gap between appearance and reality without requiring every page to become a lesson or a plan.
Books are tools, mirrors, sparring partners, and sometimes simply a place to disappear into a story. I reread because the words may be the same, but I am not. A book can meet me differently as a salesman, a father, a partner, a leader, or a man rebuilding a life.
Reading has not made me certain. It has made me more willing to question what I think I know.
The library also exposes a tendency I recognize in myself: when life is uncertain, I look for another framework, another discipline, another answer. That instinct has helped me rebuild more than once. It can also become a way of trying to solve what can only be felt, accepted, or lived through. I am learning the difference.
I write for different reasons, but they return to the same purpose: I want people to feel understood and leave with something they can use. Sometimes that is a leadership model or a process. Sometimes it is recognizing their own life in another man’s story and realizing they are not the only one carrying it.
I want to write honestly about manhood: what it is to be a man, father, partner, protector, and leader; the parts men understand in one another without needing them translated; and the tension between strength, vulnerability, discipline, love, responsibility, and restraint. Trauma belongs in that conversation, but it does not get to become the identity or the ending.
The change I want is agency. I want people to stop waiting to become someone without weaknesses and instead build processes around the weaknesses they actually have. When a career, relationship, health, or sense of self changes, the loss is real. So is the responsibility to decide what happens next. You can rebuild without letting what happened become the author of the rest of your life.
I do not yet know whether all of that belongs in one book. I am not forcing a title or manufacturing a neat ending. For now, I write in public, follow the questions that keep returning, and let the deeper work reveal its shape. Some stories can be carried in an essay. Others need the privacy, context, and honesty that only a book can hold.
Ideas I keep returning to
What it means to be a man, father, partner, protector, and leader when strength includes honesty, restraint, service, and responsibility.
How to stop pretending weaknesses do not exist and build processes that make it possible to function, grow, and keep commitments.
The relief of knowing someone else has carried something similar, without turning pain into an identity or permission to stay stuck.
How to rebuild when a career, relationship, family structure, friendship, health, or former identity is no longer there.
How clarity, accountability, protection, love, and disciplined execution operate at work, at home, and within ourselves.
Latest essays
I publish new essays on Medium—from leadership and systems to identity, family, ambition, peace, and reinvention.
Breaking generational patterns is complicated when some of the things you survived also helped make you strong. Some of the adults in my childhood were not safe people. That is difficult to write plainly,…
Read on Medium ↗Sep 8, 2026We say we want people to understand us, but too often we approach disagreement in a way that makes understanding almost impossible. I have spent a lot of my adult life trying to solve problems. That comes…
Read on Medium ↗Sep 1, 2026When I was younger, I thought there would eventually be a point when I had figured life out. I am starting to think maturity is accepting that point never comes. When I was younger, adulthood looked…
Read on Medium ↗Sep 1, 2026It took me a long time to understand that peace is not the absence of problems. It is the ability to stop organizing your life around the expectation of them. For a long time, I thought peace was something…
Read on Medium ↗Aug 17, 2026There is a version of gratitude that I have never completely understood. The idea that if you are truly grateful for what you have, you should somehow stop wanting things to be different. I don’t think life…
Read on Medium ↗Aug 17, 2026I have always gotten a lot of satisfaction from being useful. Not important. Useful. There is a difference. I like being the person who can help solve the problem. The person who can carry some weight when…
Read on Medium ↗A snapshot of what I am building, learning, and working toward right now.
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