My career began in the back office of Bass VRI, the engineering startup my father founded. When I was 12, my bedroom became its first office, and I began working with him and the CPA on accounting, payroll, QuickBooks, inventory, and customer records. Tracking tens of thousands of components showed me how purchasing, cash, and information affected the business.

As Bass VRI grew, reliable information and clear ownership helped the back office keep pace with engineering and sales. I became curious about why some processes supported growth while others became bottlenecks.

Competitive policy debate throughout College taught me to research unfamiliar issues, test recommendations against opposing evidence, and defend my reasoning under pressure. At Patrick Henry College, coursework in government, psychology, ethics, global development, and statistics helped me understand how institutions, incentives, behavior, and evidence shape results.

That combination still shapes how I lead operations: the day-to-day discipline to keep an organization running and the judgment to improve it.

At Yohanan, operating decisions had immediate consequences. I ran an interstate distribution department across Maryland, Washington, D.C., Virginia, and West Virginia. I designed routes, organized employees, managed service quality, and built long-term relationships with executive leaders and chefs at The Inn at Little Washington and several José Andrés restaurants.

If a route was poorly planned or an expectation was missed, we saw the result that day. I learned that good operations depend on judgment, communication, and trust as much as they depend on process.

At George Washington University, I managed business administration for roughly 50 people, led five direct reports, and coordinated work across more than 10 shared service offices. Finance, human resources, procurement, contracts, payroll, compliance, and program operations all had to work together, even when the people involved had different priorities and schedules.

That environment changed how I thought about leadership. A job title can assign responsibility, but it cannot create trust or shared understanding. Moving work forward meant understanding people's expertise and constraints, earning trust, and giving them information they could act on.

Today, as Director of Operations at the University of California, Berkeley, I manage operations for a business portfolio exceeding $50 million, with more than 80 personnel across seven sites and more than 30 funding partners. I lead an eight-person operations team and direct work across financial planning, workforce strategy, contracts, procurement, governance, controls, risk, facilities, and service delivery.

Much of my work now involves turning that complexity into choices people can act on. When contract renewals, uncertain funding, and personnel decisions converged, I developed an integrated renewal and workforce plan that brought the tradeoffs, dependencies, and timing into one place. Leaders could see the decisions ahead and act before their options narrowed.