Put Me in Front of a Crowd

I like to write. I like it a lot.

But put me in front of a crowd with a microphone in my hand, and there's nowhere I'd rather be.

Over the years, I've had the chance to speak with a pretty wide range of groups, including professional meetings, student organizations, universities, healthcare groups, veterinary organizations, and leadership teams. The settings have ranged from classrooms and small group discussions to conference rooms and larger professional meetings, and I enjoy all of them for different reasons.

The subjects vary too. Sometimes the conversation is about careers, leadership, business, communication, education, or workplace culture. Sometimes it is about veterinary medicine, building something of your own, or simply figuring out what comes next. I don't think every audience needs the same talk, and I'm much more interested in understanding who is in the room and what would actually be useful to them.

Whatever the topic, I tend to rely on stories, practical examples, some humor, and a healthy dose of Appalachian honesty. I'm not much interested in standing behind a podium reading bullet points to a room full of grown adults who can read just fine on their own. I'd rather have people leave with something worth thinking about, something they can actually use, and maybe a story or two they still remember after most of the slides are long gone.

What I Speak About

Featured Talks

These are some of the presentations I currently offer. Each can be adapted to the audience, event format, and time available.

Career Capital: Build It Before You Need It

I've never taken a job because it paid the most. I've taken jobs because of what I'd learn, who I'd meet, or what door it might open five years down the road, long before I knew what that door would even lead to. This talk is built around that idea: the skills, relationships, and reputation you build now are the actual currency of a career, and most people don't realize how much of it they're already sitting on. We work through four questions that matter more than salary or title, and everybody leaves with a plan for the one piece of their own career capital that needs the most work.

The Title Comes Later: Leadership Before Authority

Nobody handed me a title before people started trusting me with hard calls, and nobody's going to hand you one either. This talk runs on three things I've watched separate people who get followed from people who just get obeyed: showing up prepared before it matters, owning it when something goes sideways, and making the people around you better instead of just looking better yourself. I've led rooms of five and rooms of three hundred. The math hasn't changed.

The Veterinary Solopreneur

Somewhere along the way I ran a mobile livestock practice out of a truck, sold two businesses, and spent over a decade selling things on eBay and Amazon on the side, mostly because I like building things and I'm apparently incapable of having just one job. Not everyone who wants something of their own wants to buy a hospital and manage a payroll. Sometimes it's relief work, or consulting, or a side project you test on nights and weekends before you quit anything. This talk walks through how to tell whether an idea is worth your time, what it'll actually cost you, and when small is exactly the right size to keep it.

Your Story Is Worth Telling

I spent most of my career assuming nothing that happened to me at work was interesting enough to write down. Then I started writing about it anyway, and it turns out plenty of people wanted to read it. This talk is for anyone sitting on a career's worth of stories they've filed under "not a big deal." It walks through how to find the actual lesson buried in an ordinary day, get it onto the page in your own voice, and share it without stepping on anyone else's privacy along the way.

The Comfort Trap

There's a moment in a career nobody warns you about. It isn't the early struggle and it isn't burnout, it's quieter than both, and it shows up dressed as success: the work finally starts to feel easy. This talk is about the dangerous stretch when things are going fine, exactly when it's easiest to stop paying attention, and what it actually takes to leave a comfortable spot well instead of getting pushed out of it.

Starting a Veterinary Technician Program from Scratch

I built an AVMA-accredited veterinary technology program from the ground up, curriculum, faculty, clinical partnerships, and accreditation, and later did similar work directing two accredited veterinary nursing programs at Purdue. This talk is for anyone considering starting an academic program in a crowded, regulated field: what accreditation actually requires, what it takes to recruit faculty and students to something that doesn't exist yet, and the decisions that determine whether a new program survives its first few years.

Keep the Accent: Staying Exactly Who You Are

Somewhere along the way, plenty of professionals learn to sand down whatever makes them stand out, the way they talk, where they're from, what they actually believe, and trade it for whatever version seems safer or more polished. I never did that, starting with the literal accent, and I don't think it's cost me anything. This talk is about staying recognizably yourself as you move up, change rooms, and end up around people who didn't grow up the way you did, and why authenticity tends to earn more trust than the polished version ever does.

Leading a Team That Doesn't Speak the Same Professional Language

A hospital floor has clinicians, technicians, administrators, and trainees in the same room, each trained differently, each measuring success differently, and each occasionally talking right past each other. This talk covers what it takes to get a genuinely mixed professional team working from the same page, without flattening out what makes each role different in the first place.

Utilizing Veterinary Technicians in Mixed and Large Animal Practice

Technician utilization gets talked about constantly in small animal practice and almost never in mixed and large animal settings, where the logistics, the caseload, and the economics all work differently. This talk draws on years in mixed-animal practice and covers what utilization actually looks like on a farm call or in a large-animal setting: what technicians can take off a veterinarian's plate, what gets in the way of it happening, and what changes for a practice that gets it right.

Having the Conversation You've Been Avoiding

Most workplace conflict isn't really about the thing people are fighting over. It's a conversation that got put off weeks ago and never happened. This talk covers how to recognize when avoidance is doing more damage than the hard conversation would, and how to actually have it without making things worse.

The Business Side of Doing Good Work

Plenty of people go into healthcare, education, or service work because they care about the work itself, and then spend a career slightly embarrassed by the budget, staffing, and pricing decisions that keep the whole thing running. This talk covers the financial and operational side of mission-driven work: why it deserves the same attention as the mission does, and how to lead it without losing sight of why you started.

Own It Anyway

The easiest thing a leader can do when something goes wrong is point at what got in the way, a bad hire, a supply shortage, an employee who dropped the ball. The harder and more useful move is to own the outcome anyway, understand what could have been controlled or prevented, and fix it from there. This talk covers what it actually looks like to lead that way: taking full responsibility for a team's results, good and bad, without turning it into self-blame or bureaucracy, and how that mindset changes what a team is willing to do for you.

Up For More Than This List

Those are where I usually start, not where the conversation has to end.

I'm up for building something new around careers, workplace culture, veterinary business, hospital operations, entrepreneurship, workforce development, professional communication, education, or organizational leadership. If you've got an audience and a problem, idea, or question worth exploring, there's a good chance we can put something together.

Why Me?

Let’s Talk About Your Event

Tell me a bit about what you’re planning.