From Kansas City to the deal seat, told in six chapters.

To go deeper on finance, I chased the fundamentals. Real estate was the best place I could find to learn modeling and valuation at a serious level — first at Ziegler Capital Markets, the #1 underwriter of continuing-care retirement communities (CCRCs), then at Green Street Advisors, the #1 shop covering REITs at the time. It was rigorous, quantitative, and unforgiving. But the excitement was elsewhere. I followed it back to technology at Thomas Weisel Partners, where I sat in a dual seat: originating convertible securities as an investment banking associate, and working alongside the prop desk pricing option-adjusted spreads for a convertible-bond arbitrage strategy.

“Real estate taught me modeling. Convertibles taught me markets.”

In 2014, I put the analytical toolkit to work as a founder. My wife recognized an unmet need for specialized training for prenatal and postpartum women, and we co-founded The Lotus Method. She built the practice; I brought the operating discipline, the financial model, and the investor story. We raised over $5M — half of it non-dilutive — and scaled to seven brick-and-mortar locations at peak. The company is now positioned for sale. I know what the founder's chair feels like: the 3 a.m. model stress, the board pitch, the recap, the exit. That empathy is hard to teach — and it is exactly what makes me credible across the table.

“I know what the founder's chair feels like. That empathy is hard to teach.”

The next chapter is M&A advisory — and I know exactly where I'd hunt. My lead lane is digital health, wellness, and femtech: I'm not covering it from the outside — I co-founded a women's health company, raised over $5M (half non-dilutive), scaled it to seven locations, and I am running its sale process right now. My second lane is the software making Main Street more efficient — vertical SaaS, payments, and embedded fintech for SMBs — where I bring something rare in a banker: I was the customer, running the booking, POS, payments, and payroll stack this category sells. My third lane is edtech and workforce learning, and it's a thesis: distribution is the scarcest asset in education — upstarts can build product but can't reach the district, the campus, or the enterprise L&D buyer — so the coming cycle belongs to consolidators acquiring their way to product breadth. I've seen that constraint from the inside launching the Investment Banking Institute's San Francisco operation and teaching within iXperience. Three lanes, three kinds of credibility: founder-seller, customer-operator, thesis-insider. And behind all three, the same revenue case — 25+ founder, board, and investor relationships in the mid-market sweet spot: founder-led companies approaching their first process, who need their story made clear, compelling, and credible.

“Three lanes, three kinds of credibility: I'm selling in the first, I was the customer in the second, and I've lived the constraint driving the third.”