Hello!

Thanks for stopping by. As a kid, I ran the 5k distance in cross country races and the 1600 and/or 3200 meter events on the track. While I certainly wasn’t world class, I had somewhat respectable times of around 19 minutes in a 5k, and peaked with a 5:02 (1600 meter) and 11:04 (3200 meter) times.

After graduating high school, I attended the University of Vermont where I not only received a degree in Business Administration concentrating in Accounting, but also had an “almost minor” in computer science. At UVM, I also stopped running in favor of joining the UVM Cycling team. It was here that I began to love cycling. The UVM team would travel all across the mid-Atlantic region to race other colleges each weekend.

Joining the “Real World”

After graduating college, I accepted a job with the Big 4 public accounting firm Ernst & Young as an auditor. I worked on public and private company audits. I received unparalleled exposure to companies, they way they do business, insight into their systems, and education into a variety of industries.

After a few years at Ernst & Young, I joined a regional accounting firm (Baker Newman & Noyes) doing the same type of work as an auditor. After going through a few more “busy seasons” I realized that I wanted a job that was more flexible to allow me to work hard during the day, but be home on nights and weekends to be with my family. I left public accounting and accepted a job at Wentworth Douglass Hospital (WDH) as a Systems Analyst.

The job at WDH was a great fit for me. I was able to leverage my skills from public accounting with my love for computer systems and technology. Here I worked on a variety of system reporting, ERP upgrade testing, system integration, and other projects where the finance department was a major stakeholder. I received a call from a company called Dyn asking me if I wanted to join and lead their accounting department. Dyn was a client of mine from public accounting and among one of my favorite audits.

During my time as Dyn’s controller, I led and grew the accounting department from a team of two individuals to a team of ten. I was responsible with the creation of dedicated billing, accounts payable, payroll, and financial statement close teams. I oversaw the implementation of several major systems including billing, ERP/Accounting, travel & expense management, and stock based compensation. I also implemented and wrote a variety of business policies including purchasing, expense reporting, and travel.

As with all things at a very fast growing company, we recognized that my strengths were in marrying the financial and accounting processes to systems, technology, and business process. As we brought in a new Controller with experience running larger accounting teams and taking companies public, I shifted into a different role as a Sr. Business Systems Analyst who was responsible for managing new and existing projects requirements, overseeing implementation of the projects, managing system stakeholders, and evaluating current business processes to determine where changes can have the most impact on efficiency, cost savings, and improvement on controls. Shortly after my time at Dyn, the company was acquired by Oracle.

One of the largest projects I was a part of at Dyn, was the evaluation of billing platforms. As it would be, one of the companies I evaluated would become my employer. Enter Aria Systems. I was a Sr. Solution Architect. My responsibility was to help the sales team close deals faster while also getting prospects comfortable with our product. I also occasionally worked on the implementation side helping customers with their solution design. I often could be found meeting or presenting to both finance departments and technical teams. In addition, I worked with the product team ensuring direct feedback from the field on what customers and prospects want and need.

After a few years at Aria my skills are now being utilized at Oracle + NetSuite. I had a great fondness for NetSuite as I implemented it at Dyn, was the system administrator, and business analyst. It helped our company get a lot done with quite powerful software. I’m now working to build and configure datasets that Sales Engineers can use in the field to tell the story and convey the power NetSuite can bring to the table while spending a reduced amount of time preparing for demos. Put more simply, I’m helping the sales team spend more time actually closing deals and less time setting up the system preparing to close deals.

My comments and discussion on this blog are my own and do not represent that of my employer, past or present.

Running, Cycling, and Triathlons

While at Dyn, I quickly realized there was a large group of people who were regular runners, cyclists, and triathletes. We started to go for semi-regular runs at lunch time and participated in our first Reach the Beach (RTB) relay. After my first year doing RTB, I was hooked and remembered how much I enjoyed running and cycling. I’ve since trained for and completed several half marathons, century bike rides, and triathlons (including Half Ironmans).

It’s interesting to look back and see how you come full circle and do the things you love again. This site is a mechanism to document my training, racing, outdoor activities, and a little tech thrown in. I’ve even gone so far to write about why I believe a triathlete makes a great employee and why you should hire one.