About
I’m a workaholic, a builder (figuratively speaking) and a problem solver by who is always looking for an engaging challenge.
I could easily write a novel on my background, but I’ll try to focus on my experiences and successes that are relative to my skills and consulting practice for the most part. I figure those people who are willing to pay my rates deserve some insight into my history.
I was born in Kingston Ontario in 1969 and grew up in Belleville Ontario.
During the late 1970s our neighbor was a programmer for the city of Toronto where he wrote software to manage traffic lights. He had a mainframe at home and I used to watch him work with punch cards. One year he took me under his wing and decided to help me with my school science project. We built a fully functional solar water heater and not only did I win the science fair at my elementary school, but I also won the regional science fair in Peterborough Ontario. Solar power was in its infancy at that time, so the project garnered a lot of attention. So much attention in fact that I was interviewed by the local television station. They broadcast their report on my project several times, which was a huge deal to me at the time. Back then television was the high tech information medium.
In the early 1980s I was one of four students chosen by our county’s school board to participate in a pilot project for computer classes. One day a week for an entire school year the four of us traveled to the board office to learn how to use Commodore PET computers. At that point I was hooked on technology and have been active in the field ever since as either a hobbyist or a professional.
I graduated high school at the top of my class as an Ontario Scholar. After high school I attended Seneca College in Toronto and Queen’s University in Kingston. I studied business, political science and economics with consistent marks in the 90% plus range. However, after several years of post secondary classes I felt the need to find something more stimulating.
In the early 1990s I moved to Arlington Texas and went to work for Genesis Construction. For two years I worked hands on in commercial and residential construction and learned a tremendous amount of common sense from my employers. I was still in my early twenties and eventually became homesick.
At that point in time I moved back to Ontario and secured a job at Beaver Lumber, who at the time were the largest lumber retailer in Canada. I quickly moved up from an entry level sales position to a regional sales manager. In my first year alone I was personally responsible for a 15% increase in sales in my region. Most of that was attributable to me tapping into new customers, which included supplying lumber for industrial crating operations. A significant part of my time at Beaver Lumber was spent using BLISS (Beaver Lumber Integrated Sales System), which was truly cutting edge for its time. BLISS tied together 162 retail outlets and a number of distribution centers in real time for everything from stock levels to accounts receivable and every other back office function imaginable.
In the mid 1990s I lost the vision in my left eye in a serious snowmobile accident. For the better part of two years I was unable to drive and was consequently trapped at home. I still provided consulting services over the phone and by email to Beaver Lumber, but I certainly couldn’t function like my pre-accident self. After two years of receiving insurance benefits one of my carriers decided that I no longer qualified. They put me through a battery of tests in an effort to show that I was capable of returning to work. Twice they had me undertake aptitude and IQ tests. When I scored in the 99th percentile I was quite pleased with myself. However, my attorney – the eternal pragmatist – quickly reminded me that there were somewhere between 5 and 6 billion people on the earth at the time and that meant there were 50 to 60 million people smarter than me in the world. Talk about a rapid boost to the ego quickly followed by an equally rapid dose of reality.
While I was convalescing I spent most of my time reading whatever technology related content I could find on the very young Internet. I suffered through horrible dial up speeds, but the Internet still provided me with a window on humanity. My primary insurance company ended up putting an offer in front of me that either required me to take a one time settlement, or sign off on ever engaging in gainful employment in return for a small pittance each month. I took the one time settlement and promptly purchased shares in a small computer store in Rossmore Ontario.
That business was doing approximately $25k a month in sales when I first became involved. Within a year we were doing $100k a month selling computers and computer peripherals. Things were looking up, but two storms appeared on the horizon; Dell was gobbling up market share with their very successful direct to customer business model and big box stores were moving into small town Ontario. Both of these changes to the marketplace spelled certain doom for small independent computer shops. As such, we immediately started building a practice around delivering professional services to small and medium sized businesses managing their desktop PCs, servers and network equipment.
One of the other shareholders at the time wanted to solely focus on retail sales and home users while I was convinced that catering to other businesses was the only way we would survive. In the end we parted ways amicably with half of us taking the professional services business and the other half of the shareholders remaining in the PC business. Within two years they were unfortunately out of business while our professional services endeavor at beONix Technology was landing contracts with major international companies such as Sun Microsystems and General Electric.
A large portion of our success was due to my ability to bridge both the business and technical worlds. Business people and technical people typically speak two different languages and without a mediator who understands both sides of the equation it’s tough to get results.
During my ten year tenure as the President of beONix Technology I often delivered trade show speeches on behalf of Sun Microsystems at events like Real World Linux. We also opened the first Sun Linux Competency Center in the world in 2003 and even made the front page of both Slashdot and the printed magazine Computer World for doing so. I personally traveled across North America training Sun Microsystems employees, channel partners and end-users. Those sessions included marketing seminars for management personnel and technical training for Systems Engineers.
One of the clients that we picked up as a result of the Sun training sessions was the city of Toronto’s children’s services division. In 2003 and 2004 we jointly developed a live CD desktop solution for approximately 500 users that once again put us on the front page of Computer World. That project allowed only 5 Systems Engineers to look after 64 remote sites since all of the data was housed in a central location, which was accessed remotely by the diskless thin clients.
While I was still providing consulting services to Sun we also picked up a lab management contract for Nortel’s Enterprise division. It quickly became evident that they had no significant patch management strategy for maintaining systems on their various lab networks. As most people know Nortel went through layoff after layoff and employees and contractors who survived each round of cuts were asked to do more with less. We ended up extending an open source project called OCSng, which allowed us to manage thousands of Windows, UNIX and Linux systems with only 4 Systems Engineers. This custom software solution provided a huge reduction in footware (read on-site people), which saved Nortel hundreds of thousands of dollars.
I stepped aside at beONix Technology early in 2008 when I handed over the reins to my life long friend Wayne Brown. Since then I have spent most of my time providing consulting services to mid-market business in the U.S. and Canada, which includes some of beONix Technology’s client base. Please read the “Services” section of my Web site for more details on how I can cut your costs and make your business more money.
If you made it this far and you’re wondering what I do in my spare time I read an average of 50,000 to 100,000 words per day, develop open source software just to scratch the itch, workout religiously, coach high school football, ride motorcycles and watch the occasional movie with my daughter.
Cheers,
