Where it starts
I was raised substantially by my grandparents in Atlanta, and the two of them taught me the same lesson from opposite directions. My grandmother worked her way from a department-store clerk to store manager, then spent twenty years at Kroger after the chain came to Atlanta — retiring from the same employer where I'd later take my own first job. My grandfather spent three separate careers in public service. Neither of them talked about reinventing anything. They just showed up, built something solid, and stayed long enough for it to matter. That's the model I actually grew up with, long before I had a word like "systems thinking" for it.
In high school I built a website and ran promotion for a local independent artist. It wasn't a business plan, it was curiosity, but it was also the first time I watched something I built change what happened for someone else. I've been chasing that feeling in one form or another ever since.
Learning the hard way, on purpose
My actual career started on a headset at Teleperformance, on the AT&T Mobility account: floor support, then quality analyst, then Training Delivery Manager — AT&T's own official designation for the role, with its own required certifications — designing and facilitating new-hire and new-initiative training as the company expanded internationally and stood up new sites. From there, a supervisor role in telecom at Sprint. Nothing about that path was glamorous, but it set the pattern I still lead with. I've always operated as a player/coach more than a hands-off manager — close enough to the actual work to understand it in depth, not just the dashboard version of it, and using that to teach rather than to direct from a distance. Most organizations aren't short on effort, they're short on systems that make the effort count, and you can't design that system without having done the job yourself first.
I finished a BS in Information Technology and then an MBA at Clayton State while working full time, nights and weekends, because I wanted the credential to match the instinct I already had. I don't jump; I build the bridge first and cross it once it's load-bearing. That's as true of grad school while employed as it is of every venture since.
Cox Automotive
That instinct is what took me from the floor into Cox Automotive, leading a team through several big changes landing at once. The one I remember most is automating a manual sales-order process that had been quietly eating days off our cash cycle. Change like that only sticks if people believe it's being done with them, not to them, so instead of running the same training past everyone, I figured out exactly where coaching would actually move the needle and put it there. We measured whether it worked instead of assuming it: 84% sense of belonging, 77.9% alignment with business direction, on a team that had every reason to be worn out by that much change at once.
From there I moved into product ownership and then business intelligence, and the job shifted from coaching one team through change to zooming out and redesigning the operating model itself: I led the build-out of self-service analytics infrastructure that let national dealer teams answer their own questions instead of waiting on an analyst, replacing a dependency with a capability. The technical build was never the hard part. Getting people who'd done things one way for years to trust a new system, and grow into using it well, was.
Building my own
I got my real estate license in 2020, while I was still at Cox, because I wanted a second track that was mine. By 2023 that second track had become Property Revaluation Experts, and I left Cox to run it full time. Since then I've spent most of my energy on the same problem at different scales: a county valuation system quietly drifting out of compliance, a construction company's estimates that couldn't be trusted twice in a row, a mental health practice with no address and no local visibility. In every case the fix wasn't a clever idea, it was rebuilding the underlying system — the calibration model, the pricing pipeline, the marketing engine — and staying close enough afterward to know whether it actually held.
Alongside that I still run my own real estate and lending practice, I've taken on fractional COO and CMO work for an Indianapolis construction company and an Atlanta mental health clinic, and I lead the EYLU Real Estate Club as president across nine regional chapters, which has turned out to be less about real estate and more about teaching people a way of thinking about their own careers that nobody handed me early enough.
What it adds up to
None of this reads as a straight line, and I've made peace with that. The actual throughline is simple: find a system that's quietly stopped working for the people depending on it, and rebuild it into something they trust enough to actually use. I've done that with a headset on, with a dashboard, with a valuation model, and with a business of my own. I expect to keep doing it wherever the next one turns up.