I serve on boards and advise private equity sponsors and their portfolio companies. Current roles include:
- Board Director, Lineus Medical. 2026 - present
- Member, Board of Advisors, KMF Investments Partners. 2023 - present
- Chair, Board of Advisors, BIS Department, M.J. Neeley School of Business, TCU. 2019 - presentThree decades building and running services businesses. A professional services organization scaled through 60x growth. A $353MM P&L with ~1,500 people. Three disconnected teams consolidated into one consulting business at a $100MM run rate. That work was done at AWS and Cisco, and most recently at Elastic, where I built a practice development function.A small number of board seats and advisory engagements each year, where the problem is interesting and I can affect the outcome.
Background
OpenRun Ventures: Managing Director. Board service and operating advisory for private equity sponsors and their portfolio companies.Elastic: VP, Practice Development. 2025 - 2026. Built the practice development function for a global professional services organization.AWS: Managing Director and Co-Lead, US Market Segment. 2021 - 2022. Co-led the $353MM US business, up 18% year on year. About 1,500 people, about 1,000 engagements, about 500 enterprise customers, 9.4 out of 10 CSAT.AWS: Managing Director and COO, Professional Services. 2015 - 2021. Six years, through 60x revenue growth and 40x headcount growth. Built the planning, financial, enablement and quality mechanisms behind it.Cisco: 1999 - 2015. Ended as Managing Director and COO of Cisco Consulting Services, consolidating three teams into one consulting entity and taking it to a $100MM run rate. Earlier, services portfolio management, global education, and the Internet Business Solutions Group.Prior experiences include Ernst & Young Management Consulting and American Airlines Decision Technologies (later known as Sabre).M.S. Industrial Engineering and Operations Research, University of Alabama.
B.E. Mechanical Engineering, Anna University.
How I Work
I do plenty of strategy work and I enjoy it. But strategy is a bet, not a plan, and bets get won or lost in the follow-through.What holds a growing company back is rarely the thinking. It’s whether there’s a real operating rhythm. Whether people know what they own. Whether the leadership team does what it said it would do.The standards I hold a team to are short. Work backward from the outcome and measure impact, not activity. Say the difficult thing to the person and not around them, and make disagreement safe in both directions. Debate before the decision, align after it. Finish what you start. Separate fact from assumption, and keep your commitments.Professional services is where I learned most of this. The firms that scale well run on something close to an operating system: shared values, a clear value proposition, accountabilities written down, and metrics that mean something. I’ve spent years refining that framework, and it holds up well outside professional services too.
Earlier Board & Advisory Work
Solvd, backed by Siguler Guff. Board Advisor through the transition from an independent test automation business to a PE-owned consultancy with a board and formal oversight.SMC, backed by HighView. Senior Advisor through the digital transformation of a road marking and highway services business, and advisor to the sponsor on digital best practices across the portfolio.
"You coached them through the eye of the storm, helping them mature as an executive team."
PE Managing Partner, on work with one of his portfolio companies
Why OpenRun?
"The ski runs are open" is one of the best weeks of our family's year. The other reason is open source, and what it gets right: collaboration, transparency, rapid prototyping, meritocracy.
