I’ve signed the front of the check.

Goodyear, 1988 to 2003

I joined Goodyear in 1988 and stayed until 2003. I started as a store manager and field trainer, became a district manager, and ended up running sales, training and advertising for an $85 million Northeast and Mid-Atlantic region. Along the way I was the on-site project manager for opening 44 retail stores in California, and I managed Fortune 50 accounts across nine states, growing market share 12%.

Goodyear is where I learned that training isn’t an event. It’s how a big company gets thousands of people to do the right thing on an ordinary Tuesday.

Running the floor at CompUSA

In 2003 I became general manager of CompUSA’s Washington/Baltimore operation: $17 to $20 million across retail sales, training sales and delivery, technical service, and business-to-business sales. I built a B2B sales team that hit plan for 15 consecutive months, and earned a 2004 Profit Protection Award, one of six awarded company-wide.

In 2006 I became vice president and chief marketing officer at Vyalex, a firm serving the Department of Defense and civilian federal agencies. I built its marketing department from scratch, grew sales 20%, and wrote the acquisition plan that added $15 million in annual sales.

2007: starting from zero

In March 2007 I left and founded BLE Training. No clients, no team, no safety net. Today it delivers corporate training and proctored testing from six locations across Maryland, Pennsylvania, Texas, Ohio and Kansas, for hospitals, universities and companies in more than 40 industries.

Building it meant doing every job at some point: selling the work, teaching the class, hiring the instructors, fixing the schedule, answering the escalation, and making payroll. Including the week the math didn’t work.

Inside big companies, too

I never stopped working inside large organizations. I worked with both Continental Airlines and United Airlines before they merged, including leading a training team supporting Continental’s technology rollout, and I trained and managed 15 training specialists across the Southeast. From 2018 to 2020 I facilitated Capital One’s training curricula across Maryland, Virginia and New York. Seeing how big companies build leaders, and then going back to build my own, is the combination I bring to every owner I work with.

Still learning

I went back to school more than once: the executive business program at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business in 2006, an MBA with an entrepreneurship focus from LSU, Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses in 2019, and a bachelor’s degree from Southern New Hampshire University in 2023. Not because I needed the credentials. Because I wanted to keep getting better at the work.

Still building

Today I’m building CourseBldr.ai / InstructorKit with my family as co-founders, and working with Family Business Performance Group on succession and governance for multi-generational businesses. I completed Leadership Howard County in 2008 and Leadership Maryland in 2019, and I’ve served on the board of Big Brothers Big Sisters of Maryland.

About ten companies over my career. Some worked. Some taught me more.