Thanks for taking the time to click through and learn a little more about me.

The main pages on this site focus primarily on my advisory and mentoring work. I want to share a few experiences from my own professional journey that shaped me and my work.

My career has not been linear. There have been periods of growth, moments where I hit ceilings, roles I had to grow into, setbacks I did not expect, and times where I needed other people to help me see what I could not yet see myself.

There have also been a few moments where I simply had to decide whether I was even going to keep going.

What follows is not intended to be a complete biography. You can find the details of my career on LinkedIn. This page is about some of the experiences behind the resume.

I’m going to start with the last corporate position I held. I had responsibility for marketing and strategy for a joint venture owned by several large healthcare companies.

Part of the role was setting the strategy for growth and helping drive the results that followed. The other part was leading marketing across a broad set of insurance and supplemental products that moved through multiple brands, co-branded partnerships, and consumer, business, and government channels.

At one point, I managed marketing connected to nearly three quarters of a billion dollars in insurance premium.

I’m proud of the work. I’m proud of the executive team and the growth we achieved. It was a great way to end my corporate executive career.

Before getting to that role, though, I had to grow into it. I had moved from strategy into marketing leadership and was trying to grow into broader responsibility.

I had been successfully delivering results for a few years, but I had hit a ceiling.

At one point, a new executive was brought in above me, moving me further from, not closer to, the C-Suite. That did not feel good from the first day of that structure to the last day it was in place.

At times, I did express my frustration with it. I’m human, but most of the time, my role was clear. I still needed to deliver. I still needed to produce results. I still had significant responsibility. My role was to support the new executive and the company.

One complication for me was some of the executive team didn’t fully understand what I was doing. Their lack of understanding was my fault.

Also, my fault was that I didn’t always show up the way I needed to in that particular industry and with those particular companies.

I had a rough and sometimes emotional learning curve. I’m grateful I had some very good executives guiding me, calling me on my mistakes, and helping me develop.

Eventually the structure changed. By then, I had proven myself. I had adjusted how I worked and how I showed up. I was ultimately promoted.

Consulting was a different chapter of my life. I loved consulting from day one until my last day. That experience is still the foundation for my work.

Beyond my clients, I also thrived in mentoring and development roles inside the firm. I enjoyed recruiting and developing new consultants and helping guide careers. Today, many of those consultants are senior executives and consulting partners.

I am also proud of the work I did advocating for underrepresented groups and pushing for opportunities that allowed them to succeed inside large organizations.

My drive to advocate in that way comes from my own experience being one of a handful of openly gay consultants at the firm and eventually becoming the first openly gay individual nominated for partnership.

By that stage in my career, I had demonstrated my ability to successfully deliver large consulting engagements, create intellectual capital, and take care of our people. I had also proven myself to be a strong collaborator with peers, executives, and our parent company.

What I lacked when I was first nominated for partner was probably a bit of gravitas. I was told I was too nice.

And although I had proven I could develop and grow client relationships, I had not yet proven to myself or others that I could go out and truly hunt for business in the way consulting partners are expected to do.

I knew where the gaps were because I heard them the first time I was nominated for partner and again the second and again the third.

By that third time, I knew I was ready. I needed to be. That was my last chance in a three-strikes-you’re-out environment.

It was a character-building experience and ultimately a very rewarding chapter in my professional life.

More personally, in 2010, when I had been out of consulting a couple of years, I was diagnosed with stage III cancer.

Over my medical journey, I had a number of procedures and an extensive stay in the hospital. I lost over 100 pounds.

But eventually I needed to get back to work. I needed it economically, and I needed it psychologically.

So about 60 days after leaving the cancer floor at the hospital, I began a new career search.

I still barely had my hair back and didn’t own a piece of clothing that fit. But when an opportunity for an interview came up, I pulled myself together, bought a new suit in a size I had not been in for decades, took my case of liquid nutrition — I still was on a feeding tube at that point — and got on an airplane for a job interview.

There wasn’t a choice. I needed to get after it. I needed to get some money in the bank, and so I went.

I did eventually get a role. Frankly, it was a role that a younger and healthier version of me probably would not have considered. But it was a role that helped me rebuild.

I got healthy again. I eventually moved back into leadership and senior executive roles. And I went on to have another fifteen years of corporate growth and success after cancer.

But at the end of the day, if I hadn’t decided I was getting out of bed and back into life, I would not have gotten the opportunities and success that eventually followed.

Anyway, those are a few of the experiences behind the resume.

Thanks for taking the time to read a little more about me.

Let’s find time to see if any of my lessons and experiences can be of use to you.