I grew up in New Jersey to German immigrants.  In high school, I lettered in football and track, played trombone in the Jazz, Marching, and Concert bands, and performed well enough academically to win a nomination and an appointment to the Naval Academy.  I had the great opportunity to play football for all four years at Annapolis and I graduated in 1989 with a BS in Systems Engineering and a commission as an Ensign in the US Navy.

After serving as a submarine officer – where I earned the Navy Expeditionary Medal, among others – and as an instructor at the Naval Academy (where I also had the chance to coach football for three years), I left the Navy to pursue a civilian career.  My career began as an assistant manager and supervisor at Bell Atlantic – now Verizon – and since then I’ve worked as a management consultant at Booz Allen Hamilton, a systems engineer at Photon Research Associates (now Raytheon), a senior manager of capacity management at Covad Communications (now MegaPath), and then once again at Raytheon / Photon Research Associates as a Director of Program Operations, managing certain research and development efforts on behalf of the Missile Defense Agency.  Besides developing a tremendous amount of experience working with the government, I also worked very closely with a number of companies (Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, BAE Systems, etc.).

Outside of work, I have been the President of my homeowners association and I continue to serve as President of my US Naval Academy class. I have served on the boards of several political organizations, I’ve held elected political office, and I now serve on the Board of Trustees for the 50,000 member US Naval Academy Alumni Association, where I currently serve on the Memorial Oversight Committee, the Communications Committee, and I also recently served on the CEO Search Committee.

In my academic work, I created a methodology for aligning systems engineering principles to designing organizations – an approach that I used successfully throughout my career to help organizations work better. It is this systematic, no-nonsense approach that led me to become a Growth Coach® franchise owner.

I am a guest blogger for the BizBeat feature of The Washington Business Journal and a regular speaker for business, government, and service organizations throughout the nation. I am an adjunct professor of Finance for the Northern Virginia Community College (NVCC) and I teach business classes for the Community Business Partnership in Springfield, Virginia.

I live in Annapolis with my wife and 3 children.

MBA, Robert H. Smith School of Business, University of Maryland

·          Beta Gamma Sigma Honor Society

·          Concentrations in Entrepreneurship, Finance, Organization Strategy, and Management Science

MS Systems Engineering, Institute of Systems Research, University of Maryland

·         Scholarly paper title: “The Alignment of Systems Engineering Approaches to Organizational Redesign.”

Naval Nuclear Power Training, Various Locations

·          Equivalent to MS in Nuclear Engineering; advanced studies in Physics, Chemistry, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, and Mathematics.