Keeping a multi venue entertainment business running means everything is your problem at once: the people, the point of sale, the AV that picks the busiest night to quit. I got sharp at triaging fast and fixing the thing that matters most first.

Nearly a decade owning a restaurant is a crash course in running everything yourself. I led a team of 36, tripled sales past a million a year, and oversaw a building expansion. I also taught myself the technical and systems side so I would never have to wait on a vendor to fix what kept the place running.

Building a product company in a brand new, heavily regulated industry meant writing the playbook as I went. I did every step myself, sourcing, designing, and producing the products in the lab, standing up the supply chain, and running the branding and marketing, all while the rules were still being written.

This is where the engineering habit formed. I shipped websites and a live event scoring app in PHP and SQL, produced 3D motion graphics, and taught educational robotics to students. Explaining complex systems to a room of kids, and shipping software that has to run right the first time, sharpen the same muscle.

Live broadcast has no undo. Mixing audio and running camera taught me to stay calm and make the right call in the moment, locked in with a team where one missed cue is the whole show.

On a Mercy Ships hospital ship serving Togo and Sierra Leone, we delivered more than 5,000 free surgeries in under two years. I ran the eye unit and helped coordinate care across the hospital, working alongside local health officials and government partners to make it happen. That is where I learned to earn trust quickly and run complex operations when resources are tight.

OATH was one of the first groups in Oklahoma fighting human trafficking. I spoke around the region to raise awareness and help people learn to spot it, which meant taking a heavy, uncomfortable subject and making it land with a room.

I led and trained the crews that keep a camp running behind the scenes, the meals, the projects, the constant logistics of hundreds of tasks a week. It was my first real lesson in organizing people around a shared goal and keeping a complex operation moving.