I entered the U.S. Naval Academy in 2001, weeks before September 11th changed what that decision meant. I graduated in 2005 with a degree in systems engineering, commissioned as an ensign, and went into the Navy's nuclear power program. The standard there wasn't excellence. It was zero failures. I completed nuclear power training in Charleston in 2010, served aboard the USS Chung-Hoon and the USS Ronald Reagan, deployed to the Red Sea and the North Arabian Gulf, and was part of Operation Tomodachi in March of 2011, when the Reagan responded to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear meltdown. I was promoted to lieutenant commander in the reserves in 2016 and honorably discharged that same year.

In between deployments I earned two master's degrees from UC Berkeley, in civil and environmental engineering and in city planning. In January of 2013 I went to work as a project engineer at Vigor, building two 144-car Washington State Ferries, the MV Tokitae and the MV Samish. Public infrastructure people ride every day. Same standard. No room for a mistake nobody catches.

I founded Reputation Igniter in March of 2013, first as a full-service agency serving the trades across paid, organic, and social. By 2015 the data made the decision for me. My clients' organic customers were the better customers, referrals and word of mouth, people who found my clients and decided on their own they were the right fit. I wanted more of that, not more of everything. I went all in on organic and reputation, and I've been narrowing and sharpening ever since: reputation first, then Google Business Profile and Maps, then the deeper foundations of SEO, now AI search visibility. The goal was never to be good at all of it. It was to be the most exacting at one thing. What I'm building now is more holistic than any one of those pieces, a way of engineering a brand's presence across every organic channel until its growth is inevitable and its presence in its market is unavoidable. I call that brand gravity.

That same instinct, contribute rather than just compete, is why I write for ACHR News, Plumbing & Mechanical Magazine, and Supply House Times, and why those publications asked me to build and host industry podcasts alongside them: Beyond the Wrench, Beyond the Pipes, and Beyond the Counter. It's also why I wrote Gravity, a book built around five laws I've come to trust: trust precedes growth, identity is non-negotiable, consistency outweighs intensity, alignment removes friction, and time is the only multiplier.

None of it means much without the rest of it. I met my wife in February of 2012, married her in July of 2017, and we have three kids (Luca, Ambrose, and Isabella). The Lord faithfully pursued my wife and me until we came to Christ in July of 2018. We moved to the Dallas-Fort Worth area in July of 2023. God, family, country, the trades, in that order most days, out of order on the hard ones. That's the life the work comes out of.