The stuff that explains the rest.

The house I grew up in

People and business were never separate subjects

I grew up in a house that fostered more than 150 kids over the years, run by two parents who were both CEOs. The same dinner table could cover how an organization runs and how a kid who’s had a hard road starts to trust again. I didn’t choose people-and-business as a career so much as inherit it as a first language.

The whistle

Lessons from the best referees in the world

Basketball officiating has one of the most rigorous development systems in professional sports, and for years I trained inside it — eventually earning an invitation to try out for the NBA. Every June 25th I mark that anniversary, because the opposite of success isn’t failure. What the best officials in the world taught me is that the craft is mostly not the game — it’s the film. Three to four hours reviewing a one-hour game. Hundreds of decisions graded on a spreadsheet, including the calls you didn’t make. Clipping your toughest moments and sending them to people better than you for brutally open feedback. Six hundred pages of rulebooks across three levels, known cold. Like an iceberg, ninety-five percent of the work is never seen — all anyone notices is whether you’re better the next game.

I still officiate varsity and college basketball, and I advise RefMasters, a platform for developing officials — because I think every profession should steal this development system. Most of my leadership philosophy did.

The stage

The fastest course in human behavior I ever took

I studied theater at the University of Maryland while taking elective coursework in business — and I kept gravitating back to the theater building. Never as an intended profession. As the fastest path I’d found to understanding people and how they work.

Theater is a compressed education in the things organizations spend fortunes trying to teach. Empathy, because you can’t play a character you refuse to understand. Listening, because the scene lives in what the other person actually said, not what you planned to say next. Ensemble, because the show only works when the whole cast is making each other better. Iteration, because rehearsal is structured failure with notes. Every leadership program I’ve built has had theater somewhere in its DNA — how I run a room, how I hear the thing that isn’t being said, why I believe culture is performed, not posted.

The book

I wrote a children’s book

It’s called Let’s Go Bananas, and proceeds go to UCP of Central Florida — the nonprofit my mom has led as CEO for years. Writing something my own kids would read sharpened a discipline I use constantly at work: say the true thing simply, or you lose the room.

What my kids teach me

My best leadership program wakes me up early

Jonah and Gabi teach me something about talent almost weekly, usually without meaning to — about resilience, about generosity, about doing things your own way and calling it building. I write the lessons down on LinkedIn as they happen. The pattern underneath all of them: the qualities we spend entire careers trying to hire for and develop show up first, and most honestly, in kids.

This is 40

Five things I wish I’d known

I turned forty having aged out of every “Under 40” list I’d been named to, and wrote down what I wish I’d known — or knew, but didn’t always follow.

I wrote those at forty, beginning a life different from the one I’d expected a year earlier — held up by faith, two amazing kids, an incredible family, and friendships I wouldn’t trade for anything. It wasn’t the plan. Which only means I’m in for a lot of fun surprises.