Fractional Operations Leader
Twenty years running real operations, from the driver's seat to a regional P&L. What I bring through the door is what I've done, not a framework.
I started as a CDL-A driver and worked up through dispatch and site management to regional operations leader at a national carrier: 24 locations, five states, 350+ people and $55M+ in annual revenue. I've stood up new operations from scratch, turned around ones that were failing, and developed the people who ran them after me.
I hold a Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt, but the tools aren't the point. The point is getting the people closest to the work heard, and getting decisions made.
Founder-led and family-owned operations where the work is physical and the people doing it are the product: logistics, distribution and warehousing, transportation and fleets, field services, moving and interiors, facility management and construction.
The industry label matters less than the situation. The business has outgrown the structure underneath it, and the owner is carrying the gap.
Two wholesale companies had just been brought together by an acquisition, and the owner wanted an honest read on both operations before deciding how to lead them. I spent seven days across three sites, on every shift, nights included. I watched the work first and held interviews last, so what I heard could be checked against what I saw.
The people weren't the problem. At every site they knew what was wrong, and usually how to fix it. Requests went up, nobody said no, and nothing came back. Repair budgets, route changes and pay requests had sat for months, some for years.
I delivered findings by theme, a 36-item roadmap ranked Now, Next and Later with owners, baseline metrics, starter KPIs, and one weekly cadence across both companies. The owner used it to define one operations leader role over both. The core of it fits in one line: the action log matters more than the meetings. Every item raised gets an owner, a date and an answer, including no.
This account ran 40 drivers and 3 supervisors moving 1,600 metric tons a day, and it was losing money. I spent six months driving back and forth every week to get it right.
The biggest lever was hiding in plain sight. Overweight permits were available and nobody was using them. Building the loads to use them cut the daily requirement from 66 loads to 60, which took 262,800 miles a year off the road and more than $300,000 a year out of cost. Safety incidents fell by half, and the customer renewed.
After I handed it off, it slipped back. I was sent in to fix it a second time, and I did. That taught me as much as the first turnaround: a fix that depends on one person isn't finished.
On a 40-driver account, half the drivers were leaving every year. The usual answers were bonuses and raises. Neither was the problem.
The fix was supervisory structure: who drivers answered to, how they were heard, and what happened after they spoke up. Once that changed, people stayed.
After an acquisition, I was tasked with building dedicated operations inside companies that had never run them. In one year I stood up five locations from nothing: Spokane, Yakima and Kent in Washington, Portland in Oregon, and San Leandro in California. Each one was built inside an existing terminal, working side by side with the managers and directors already running it.
On another startup the incumbent carrier walked away within a week of notice. We launched heavy at 35 drivers on purpose to protect the customer, then brought it down to 26 as we learned the operation and got more out of every trailer.
Across four national distribution centers, trucks were leaving late and detention charges were piling up. No new equipment, no new software. Just clear structure, daily follow-up, and people who knew what was expected. Detention fell 20%, worth more than $100,000 a year.
Over 20 years I've developed 18 leaders. Five went from the driver's seat to six-figure senior roles. Two more were promoted after I left, which is the test that counts.
Results from my time as an operations executive are verifiable through my employment history.