The whole story behind the $12M+ two years: what didn't exist, what I built, and the $100M deal that walked in through the front door.
A Nasdaq-listed construction technology company had 400+ branches and no digital rental channel. Every rental request ran through a phone call or a branch visit. No online path from browse to book, no data on what customers wanted before they called, and not a single identified customer email anywhere in the business. Revenue from digital was $0.
I owned the whole thing end to end: not just the storefront, but everything underneath it. That meant designing the sign-up flow from scratch, building the credit and insurance-paperwork steps customers had never been able to finish online before, and connecting the outside systems that make a real sale possible. It went live in January 2024.
Signing customers up, tied to renting, sign-up, and credit, turned the business into something that fed itself. Past a point it stopped needing a push: 4,562 new accounts in a year (up 328%) tipped it over, and accounts came to drive 80% of online orders while the sign-up system built the company's first real customer list from nothing.
The AI work was mine to direct, from the idea to the technical design to the testing: an image-recognition system (on Amazon Rekognition, trained on 1 to 2 million photos) that grew the used-equipment catalog from 5,000 items to 100,000, and a model that read live data off the machines to flag one drifting out of its normal range before it broke down. All of it was built and grown while the company was going public: new systems, built at the speed and under the scrutiny that going public demands.
The tipping point. Past it, the channel stopped needing a push and grew itself.
A website only sells to the people who find it, so I owned that too. I ran the company's whole online presence end to end: how it showed up in search, the content behind it, and a $150K a year search-ad budget alongside, building the kind of visibility a company needs heading into going public. AI did real work here too, helping grow the traffic and what we understood about it.
Search traffic doubled in ten months (June 2023 to April 2024). The top local pages grew tenfold in six. Visitors read about seven pages a visit, roughly double the biggest competitor. Those results were verified in the independent case study that profiled the work.
In 2024, a Fortune 500 energy company that had never heard of the business found it through that online presence and the experience behind it. That first contact became a $100M a year customer. No cold call, no chasing a bid: the website made the introduction, and the experience earned the trust.
This is the pattern I repeat: find the thing that doesn't exist yet, build the version people actually use (not just launch it), push it past the tipping point, and leave behind something that runs without me in the room. It's the same instinct that shaped my work on Missouri's pension governance and insurance modernization: take something fragile or nonexistent and make it durable.
As trustee, then elected chair, I helped lead Missouri's $8B state employee pension fund. It's the same build-from-nothing work in a different arena: I lifted the board's focus to the strategy level, giving it the oversight to steer the fund's investments and its risks and to lead from a higher vantage point.
Directed the statewide eFiling rollout that moved Missouri's courts from paper to digital across all 115 counties, leading 49 county implementations directly while managing a six-project portfolio. Statewide adoption is won county by county: each one had its own clerks, judges, and workflows, and each one had to come along willingly.
Led a 40-person team to replace the company's aging customer and agent platforms with something new: modern, genuinely usable, and built with the functionality the old systems never had. Lean process work along the way cut the core quote from ten minutes to three.