Sacramento sales leader · Commercial executive
Sales leader. Father. Partner. Veteran. Athlete. Writer.
None of those titles tells the whole story. Together, they begin to.
I care about building things that last: capable people, strong families, honest relationships, disciplined lives, and work that leaves something better behind.
The whole picture
Work explains what I build. Family, service, training, reading, and writing reveal why—and the man I am still becoming.
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.
↓03Early responsibility, losing 105 pounds, returning to school, and finishing an Ironman.
↓04Why endurance tested perseverance, why combat sports teach composure, and how boxing makes me a beginner again.
↓05Service, protection, accountability, vulnerability, and the kind of safety strength should create.
↓06What 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.
None of these moments happened in isolation. Each one changed what I believed I could ask of myself next.
720 papers before school
For part of seventh grade, I was up around 1:30 every morning and delivered newspapers to 720 houses before school, seven days a week. It was too much responsibility for a child, but it left me with a belief I still carry: hard does not mean impossible, and tired does not mean finished.
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. There is something powerful about signing a blank check for an amount up to and including your life. It meant accepting that service could cost me everything and continuing because the mission served something larger than me. The Navy taught me discipline, service, trust, interdependence, and leadership under pressure. I saw both good and bad leadership, learned to depend on others and become someone they could depend on, and understood that leadership is not a title. It is accepting responsibility when the stakes are real.
105 pounds
At 27, I weighed 270 pounds, smoked a pack a day, drank too much, and faced alarming health results. My doctor told me that if I did not change my life, I might not live to 45. I thought about walking my daughter down the aisle and seeing who she became. That day, I threw away the cigarettes, stopped drinking, and began the work of losing 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 other people change their lives. If I was going to become a personal trainer and put my name on that work, a certification was not enough for me. I wanted a real understanding of the human body and what I was asking people to do. I completed an accelerated bachelor’s degree in Exercise Science and Professional Training with a 3.76 GPA, making the Dean’s List every semester while working and raising a family. It was not about ego, although I was proud to become the first person in my family tree to earn a degree. It was about integrity and honor. If my name is attached to something, I need to know I have earned 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 did not know how to freestyle swim. I wanted a goal that would force me to learn unfamiliar skills and keep doing work I disliked after the novelty disappeared. Training meant 4 a.m. fifteen-mile runs and 1 a.m. hundred-mile rides, often alone because that was where life left room. I finished because I had decided I would. At the finish, however, I was frustrated with my time instead of proud. That showed me both sides of my standards: they make difficult things possible, but they can also keep me from honoring the work already done.
“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 a school I had attended before—as I moved between my mom’s home, my dad’s home, and different places. Through all of it, my Grandpa Bruce and Grandma Sally’s house was the one constant. More important, he was constant: 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. I saw him upset, but I never saw him lose control of himself. He earned respect through composure, capability, work, and the way he cared for his family. He taught me to stand tall, look people in the eye, work with my hands, respect life, and take responsibility for what I touched.
Once, when I was a boy, I shot a blue jay with a BB gun. I thought he might be proud because the blue jays chased the robins from his yard. He was not. He made me retrieve the bird, taught me how to defeather it, and had me boil and eat it. His lesson was bigger than not wasting what I had killed. It was about understanding my place in nature. The blue jay did not have less value because we disliked what it did or because its nature made it difficult to love. You do not get to treat a life as disposable because it inconveniences you. You take life only out of necessity, and if you do, you honor what was taken and accept responsibility for that choice. I carried that lesson beyond the bird: something—or someone—does not lose its value 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. He was a master welder, mechanic, and fisherman, and a craftsman in nearly everything he attempted. From him, I learned 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 my way through hard things all bear his fingerprints. Grandpa Bruce was not perfect, but he was an amazing man. I walk every step and breathe every breath 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 brown carpet. A chandelier hanging over the empty space where the dining table should have been. There was nothing in the kitchen, not even a fork. It was me, my dad, and our Doberman, Sampson.
My dad and I sat on the carpet with our backs against the wall, our feet flat, our knees bent, and our heads in our hands as we took it all in. I said, “Man, Dad, we ain’t got nothing.” He was exhausted and overwhelmed, but I never felt fear from him. He said, “We have peace, son, and you can’t put a price on that.”
I did not fully understand him until much later, when I left a life defined by tension and woke in a home that felt peaceful. I had slept well. My mom had stayed over, and we had shared a good meal the night before. Morning light came through the windows. The ordinary details felt almost sacred because the anxiety was gone.
I thought about my dad beside me on that empty floor and finally understood him. Peace is not what remains after you have everything. Sometimes it is the thing that makes rebuilding possible. You cannot put a price on that.
I believe a man leads his family through service. He protects ferociously, loves intensely, laughs, enjoys life, and becomes the person people can turn to when things go wrong.
He feels his feelings without being ruled by them. He checks his ego. He understands that being right is rarely the real target; understanding and being understood matter more. He earns respect instead of enforcing fear.
He provides, embraces the people he loves, shows his weaknesses, apologizes when he is wrong, and accepts responsibility for the example he sets. Leadership at home is not a title. It is a responsibility I take as seriously as breathing.
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.
I have studied Spanish for roughly a year and a half. Progress comes slowly enough to keep me humble and steadily enough to keep me interested. The goal is not to say that I study Spanish. It is to have real conversations.
They are work, family schedules, errands, children’s activities, time with my partner, the dog, the cat, a bike, a book, or trying to get outside and near water when Sacramento is hot. That ordinary life matters as much as the chapters that make a better headline.
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.
When 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 ↗Aug 4, 2026Sometimes the life you once wanted cannot give you what you were really asking it to provide. There is a younger version of me I still feel responsible to. He was determined. He was resourceful. He believed…
Read on Medium ↗Jul 24, 2026Survival can build discipline, resilience, and strength. It can also become an identity you never consciously chose. For a long time, I believed the strongest parts of me were the parts that could endure…
Read on Medium ↗A snapshot of what I am building, learning, and working toward right now.
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