What I am working on right now.

Operating

In seat as Director of Development & Communication at a Bay Area faith-based youth nonprofit since January 2026. Standing up a development office end to end: donor CRM, board-grade dashboard, ops playbook, live-pitch materials. Fundraising goal is to double annual revenue from $1.5M to $3M within the fiscal year.

Concurrently entertaining conversations for one 2026 operating engagement. Full-time VP or Head of Operations at a $50M-$200M multi-unit operator, or fractional Head of Operations for a 6-to-12 month turnaround. Details at /hire/.

Building

• The 160-piece blog. Eight categories of operator field notes. All live at /blog/. Next: turning the top 20 into LinkedIn Articles for native distribution.
• Custom GPTs for field leaders. Labor forecasting, weekly P&L review, service recovery playbook. Shipping one per month, published as blog posts under Build The Machine.
• SEOD Ventures. Independent practice, tenth year. Six active brands. Advising 2 founder-led operators on unit economics and operational tooling.

Reading

• High Output Management, Andy Grove — re-reading the sections on operating reviews and leverage.
• Multipliers, Liz Wiseman — for the coaching arc with early-career general managers.
• The Stratechery archive on aggregation and distribution, applied to hospitality group thinking.
• Podcast rotation: Acquired, The Restaurant Guys, Founders by David Senra.

Thinking about

• How AI-as-operating-infrastructure changes the shape of the regional operator role over the next 5 years.
• Whether the fractional Head of Operations model is real market demand or a temporary artifact of the 2024-2026 correction.
• How to make catering channels defensible against Uber Eats / DoorDash extraction economics.

What I am not doing

• Not job-hunting broadly. One engagement per year, selected carefully.
• Not taking on new SEOD clients right now. Waitlisted.
• Not writing on X. LinkedIn and the blog only.