About

From house calls to technical leadership

My technology career began in 2000, when I founded and ran Imagine-IT. The company served home users and small businesses. I repaired computers, installed and troubleshot networks, and made on-site visits whenever a customer needed help.

It was hands-on work in the most literal sense. I had to diagnose the problem, explain it to someone who might not understand the technology, fix it with the resources available, and stand behind the result. There was no larger team to hand the problem to when something became difficult.

Since then, I have worked across systems engineering, network engineering, network security, cybersecurity, consulting, architecture, and technical leadership.

Today, I lead Optiv’s Cisco Center of Excellence as a player/coach, developing senior and principal cybersecurity advisors while directly contributing to client strategy and solution development. I develop workshops, assessments, and technical presales offerings that help clients address immediate technical needs and longer-term security priorities.

The role brings together the parts of my career I value most: developing people, working through difficult technical problems, and helping clients make decisions they can put into practice.

Networking and network security remain my strongest technical areas. They gave me the foundation for understanding how systems communicate, how environments are designed, how failures spread, and how security controls behave outside a diagram.

Much of my career has been spent assessing, designing, and improving customer environments. That work taught me that identifying a technical problem is often the easy part. The harder work is understanding the surrounding system, explaining the real risk, and helping someone make a decision they can implement.

I have spent much of my career translating between different groups of people. I can move from a packet capture or architecture diagram to a customer conversation or leadership discussion without losing sight of the technical reality underneath it. I care about whether something works in the actual environment, not merely whether it looks correct on paper.

I founded Security Titans in 2014 and retain sole ownership of the cybersecurity consulting business.

Teaching and learning

From 2011 through 2019, I taught undergraduate and graduate technology and security courses as an adjunct instructor at Fort Hays State University.

FHSU hired me for my deep technical knowledge and experience as a working practitioner. I brought that experience into the classroom, helping students connect academic theory with real-world situations and understand where actual environments differ from textbook examples. Drawing on practical use cases, I helped students understand how the concepts they were learning applied to real systems, networks, and security challenges. Teaching was an opportunity to bring academic foundations and professional experience together, giving students a practical perspective they could carry into their careers.

I was named Adjunct of the Year by the university’s College of Business and Entrepreneurship. That recognition meant a lot because teaching was never something I treated as a side obligation.

Learning remains a daily habit. I can disappear into a subject for hours when it catches my attention. Cybersecurity is a major part of my background, but it is not the boundary around my interests. Networking, artificial intelligence, automation, privacy, open-source intelligence, and infrastructure can all send me down a worthwhile rabbit hole.

How I approach problems

I look for patterns, question assumptions, and consider what a system could become. Once I see a practical direction, I want to move.

I am direct, independent, and comfortable making decisions when the situation is unclear. I will challenge an accepted answer when the evidence points somewhere else, and I care about whether a solution works in the actual environment.

Those tendencies have tradeoffs. I can move faster than others are ready to move, take on too much, or spend more time engineering a solution than the problem warrants. I recognize those habits. Balancing technical depth with simplicity, scope, and the people involved is part of my continued development as a leader.

Outside of work

I married my high school sweetheart, and we have two adult children.

Our son works in technology, with a growing focus on cloud computing and artificial intelligence. Our daughter works in healthcare and has built a career around helping people and improving the communities she serves. I am proud of both of them and the lives they are building.

Building it brought together several things I enjoy, including systems design, networking, communications, situational awareness, and solving problems in unpredictable conditions. Chasing extreme weather also puts me in an environment where information changes quickly and decisions have consequences. Apparently, even my hobbies need architecture and risk management.