I managed a rental portfolio for three years. Maintenance dispatch, resident calls, retention, turnovers. It's the kind of work where the phone rings and something has to happen — and if the information doesn't get where it's going, somebody's day gets worse.
I did that for three years. What bothered me most wasn't the work. It was how much of the day went into moving information around by hand. A request written down, then typed up. A status update that only existed in somebody's memory. A simple question that took three phone calls to answer.
I moved into a business analyst role and finally had a mandate to do something about it. The one I'm still proudest of: maintenance requests came in by phone and email, got typed into a spreadsheet, printed out every morning for the crew, and then the crew's handwritten notes got typed back in at the end of the day.
I replaced it with a request form, a shared database, and an app the techs could actually use in the field.
Average time to close a request went from 96 hours to 24.
That project is the reason I do what I do now. Not because it was sophisticated — it wasn't — but because a small change in how information moved gave a whole team their week back.
I spent the next six years at Wells Fargo, first as a senior process engineer in consumer lending, then leading automation discovery across the enterprise. I became a certified Lean Six Sigma Black Belt.
Half of that job was analysis — mapping processes, running improvement events with rooms full of stakeholders, working out which problems were worth solving and which ones just felt urgent. The other half was building. We designed and deployed automations that pulled four systems into a single view for call center agents, generated and filed customer correspondence that used to be typed by hand, and put a chatbot in front of reps so they stopped parking customers on hold to go ask a coworker a question.
The scale was different from a rental office, but the problems were identical. Work sitting still because it needed a person to carry it somewhere. Knowledge that lived in one person's head and nowhere else.
In 2024 I left the bank and spent a year as a construction project manager on a $2.8M build — eight single-family homes, permits through certificates of occupancy. Scheduling subs, tracking costs, chasing paperwork, selling the finished units.
It was a useful year. It reminded me what it's like to be the person with too much to do and no time to fix the system you're standing in.
I work with service businesses — mostly in central Iowa, sometimes further out — on the same problem wearing different clothes. It's rarely exotic. Usually it's a spreadsheet doing a job it was never built for, or a process that only works because one person remembers how.
I find those spots and build the simplest thing that fixes them.
Certified Lean Six Sigma Black Belt (Wells Fargo). Eight years in process improvement and intelligent automation.
Google (Workspace, AppSheet, Apps Script), Microsoft (SharePoint, Power Apps, Power Automate, Power Virtual Agent), Zapier, UiPath, Monday.com — whatever the situation actually calls for.