Minnesota native with a passion for large puzzles, behavioral psych, and using data to generate change in the world.

What I am usually up to…

Complex Geographic Modeling/Analysis

Taking large scale, disparate datasets, and converting them into custom designed analysis models. I have worked on projects ranging in scale from small scale mapping projects for local non-profits to decision-shaping guidance for leaders overseeing budgets in excess of $100M.

Public Works—
Planning—
Operations Improvement

Leveraging a wide ranging span of collateral data to support planning efforts within a DPW environment spanning more than a dozen states of operating area. Performing analysis for site selection and utilization. Leading and developing team members to support constant evolution of business processes and data maintenance within the organization. Aligning efforts interdepartmentally to accomplish near and long term organizational goals.

MN Peat Research for Whiskey Production

44 million acres. 17 weighted scoring factors.

109k acres of peat considered ideal for the development of some of the first All-American Peated Whiskey.

Finding the right peat to produce a North American peated Whiskey

Most peated whiskey is produced using grain that is smoked during the malt-drying process in the Scotland, UK, Ireland area using peat from harvest zones in those areas.

Until recently, there have been very few whiskeys that used grains smoked with North American peat. And, there was very little research indicating how peat in North America may compare to the peat and whiskey produced in Scotland.

As a whiskey enthusiast myself, I wanted to see if I could answer the questions:

“Could North American peat be used to make whiskey? How would it compare to Scottish peat? Where would I need to dig and retrieve peat in order to achieve optimal end product results?”

As I was completing my Masters in GIS (Geographic Information Science), I leveraged my thesis as an opportunity to do formal research on peat in Minnesota and whether it could be used for whiskey production.

With some assistance from American Peat Tech, and some scientists at NRRI at University of Minnesota Duluth, I was able to successfully complete research on much of northern Minnesota to identify ideal known peat deposits and other areas likely to contain peat though they may not be in public registers.

Check out a copy of my thesis below.

Additional details about my work on peat area available.

Please use my Contact Me page to reach out and ask away.

Many thanks to the many people who made my work on this project lead to something in the real world!

U.S. Army Reserve

Master/Community Planner & GIS Analyst

Dept. Public Works, Planning, GIS, CAD, and Puzzles

I work with GIS and other database systems to assist in managing real property and public works data. I perform complex analysis to shape strategic decision making about allocation of resources at a large scale for senior leadership figures.

CDL Helpers

Turned Qualitative Employee Feedback Into

Quantitative Data and Custom Training Material for Clients

Founded and ran a company that created custom designed tracking and training tools and content to reduce employee turnover in truck drivers.

For 6 years, I ran a company called CDL Helpers with the help of a small handful of talented employee teammates. We saved our clients on average $9+ for every $1 spent on our services. We interviewed their drivers and provided immediate crisis and conflict counseling to them. We escalated issues directly throughout the appropriate command chain at the client firm based on their operational design and preference.

Most importantly, we turned all those interactions into quantified data and insights into how their team member behaviors might change in order to improve their long term retention of those workers. By the end, we had over 11,000 unique interviews in our custom built tracking system. This did not account for the roughly 7,000 we had completed using legacy systems prior.

In the beginning, I was still going to graduate school for GIS and working during the day, and I worked on my business plan at night. When I received my first paying customer, I left school to pursue the business’ development. Over the first couple years we had to be constantly creative, iterating our methods and tracking tools in Excel nearly weekly at times to adapt our collection model to allow for optimal reporting of what we were finding.

Eventually, we began building adaptive systems for collection that streamlined the reporting of results, and finally we were able to hire a firm to develop software based on my wireframe designs that allowed to provide a real-time dashboard of the data that our clients could log into and use to collect data on their own. Eventually, we began producing content like this to help companies learn about their workers and how they might recognize which reported issues required a change in how their team addressed them. The presentation below is just a demo sample based on real data.

Over the years, I worked with many great individuals, but I I found myself struggling to engender real cultural and behavioral shifts in the middle management across my client base. We were successful if measured in dollars, but not in the long term mission of re shaping the cultures of the firms we worked with on the scale required for the clients to full internalize our model and train their teams how to do things in a way that would be constructive for their ground level workers. As wonderful as money and fun data puzzles are, I desperately wanted to find a way to help my clients not need my third party company to assist with their conflict mediation in the long term. So, I began studying Organizational Psychology, Behavioral Economics, white papers from several different journals like this great one, researching all the way back to the beginnings of leveraging psychology to influence workers and figures like Kurt Lewin. I began to develop training material to share with middle managers and attempt to help them re-think how they were processing and perceiving the behaviors of their subordinate workers, and the importance of their role in their employees’ behavioral outcomes. This led to the development of full training seminars ranging from brief handouts and some circle sessions every client visit, to full training seminars where companies paid me to fly in and train people for a day. We borrowed from all kinds of models, especially crisis intervention and some of the leading thinkers in the behavior-shaping space like Dan Ariely, Daniel Pink, Daniel Kahneman.

One of my absolute favorite things to cover right out of the gate with managers was the Fundamental Attribution Error. Responses to that material and concept was a great indicator of that manager’s likelihood to adopt all the rest of the behavioral change and management content.

As fascinated as I was by the challenge of shaping behavior in the workplace, and the study of leadership models… All of the things I was learning were also starting to tell me that many of the difficulties I was having in driving real long term change should be anticipated. Because, I was young. I started my company at 22. The people I was attempting to influence were often over 40-60 years old. I was confident I was right, executive leadership often understood and supported my conclusions, and yet that just isn’t enough for the general populace sometimes. The middle managers didn’t always see me as credible enough to drive their behavioral change, and I couldn’t blame them. I had launched into the incredible opportunity to work with companies worth more than $450 million, but I had just my bachelor’s degree in Entrepreneurship. I hadn’t raised a child. My tenure in the industry I was attempting to change radically was less than the longevity of just one position of many that my target audience had held in the industry.

I had to find ways to let the data itself be the teacher. I was always more successful when I let the data do the convincing, and I was merely the conduit that made the data digestible to the audience that needed what it had to say. There was one problem… data visualization and mapping were my weakest link. I knew how to make great charts… but I could not make maps or other visualizations.

I wanted to improve my ability to create a data-driven teaching platform, and I had begun to lose my passion for the project. Everything I was learning and applying was teaching me that it was unlikely I was going to overcome the things that were keeping me from reaching the more resistant client managers I faced without any additional tools. Since it was my company, I didn’t have the luxury of bringing in a more experienced teammate, and I didn’t have the time to wait until I could finally have a real impact.

Our options were sadly limited. We could bring in bigger investors with more clout, take on debt to hire our way out of the growth cap we were hitting, or wait patiently while we slowly overcame the growing pains in a few more years. These and any other solution involving the sale of the company would mean being obligated for at minimum several more years for all of us before being able to evolve on to new roles or new challenges. We had some long conversations as a team about whether this would actually serve our personal goals for our lives.

We all believed our time would be better used on things that trained us and made us more capable of capitalizing on future opportunities with more credibility in the bank. We could wait years for the business to finally achieve what we were wanting. Or, I could help them all find their next adventure, and once everyone was in a good place for it, close the business. All of us went on to great new chapters, and we gave our existing clients all their raw data and a final month of service for free.