Still learning. Still building. Still can’t sit still.
I’m a veterinarian, educator, hospital operator, writer, and professional overthinker of ordinary things.
Most of my career has been spent building things that did not exist, fixing things that were not working, and trying to leave people, teams, and places a little better than I found them. That sounds cleaner than it actually is. In real life, it usually involves coffee, difficult conversations, spreadsheets, barn boots, committee meetings, and realizing the problem you thought was the problem was actually just the loudest symptom.
I grew up in Appalachia and started my career as a mixed-animal veterinarian in rural West Virginia. For more than 15 years, I worked with dogs, cats, horses, cattle, goats, and the occasional creature with more opinions than medical sense. I owned a veterinary practice, built a team, launched a mobile large-animal service, expanded facilities, and learned that veterinary medicine is never just about medicine. It is about people, money, trust, timing, weather, fear, hope, and whether a 1,200-pound animal agrees with your plan.
Those years shaped almost everything about how I see the world.
Eventually, I moved into education because I became interested in a bigger question: how do we prepare people for the work that is actually waiting for them? Not the polished brochure version of the work. The real version. The version with tired teams, anxious clients, thin margins, unclear instructions, broken systems, and good people trying to do the right thing while standing in the middle of a small tornado.
That question took me into teaching, veterinary technology, veterinary nursing, academic leadership, and eventually hospital operations. I helped build educational programs, worked with hundreds of students, dealt with accreditation, curriculum, budgets, clinical training, and all the strange machinery required to turn good intentions into actual outcomes.
Today, I serve as Executive Director of Hospital Operations and Clinical Associate Professor at Iowa State University’s Lloyd Veterinary Medical Center. My work sits at the intersection of patient care, teaching, finance, operations, people, and institutional problem-solving. One hour may involve hospital budgets and service-line performance. The next may involve student learning, faculty concerns, client experience, infectious disease protocols, or why a process that looks perfectly reasonable on paper is making everyone quietly lose their minds.
I’ve worked in boardrooms and on barn floors. I have found both places contain manure. One just has better lighting.
Outside of veterinary medicine, I write.
This site is where I think out loud about life, work, money, ambition, decisions, aging, discipline, Appalachia, careers, human behavior, and the odd little gap between what we know and what we actually do. I’m interested in why people ignore their own good advice. Why we overlook the skills that come naturally to us. Why we chase credentials while dismissing the thing that may actually make us valuable. Why common sense is rarely common and almost never arrives on time.
Most people are sitting on more than they realize.
Skills they stopped counting. Experiences they dismissed. Abilities so natural they assume everyone else has them too.
They don’t.
That is the thread I keep tugging on. The thing that makes someone valuable is not always the title, credential, or polished version printed on paper. Sometimes it is a pattern they notice before anyone else does. Sometimes it is a skill they never bothered to name. Sometimes it is the way they think when they are at their best.
Finding that, naming it, and doing something useful with it interests me more than almost anything.
I’m married with two daughters. One recently graduated college with a finance degree, and the other is in nursing school. I ride a Harley, play golf with far more enthusiasm than evidence would support, and remain deeply shaped by the Appalachian place and people that raised me. My communication style is direct and conversational because I grew up where people tended to say what they meant, even when what they meant could have used a little editing.
Some days I get it right. Some days I don’t.
But I keep paying attention.