A year and a half ago I started a small side business for fun with a good friend of mine. We’ve been designing and developing an array of physical retail products and selling them online and it’s been quite a journey. The main line of products we have invested our time, talents, and money into […]
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are a well established and important feature of many high performing teams. They are used to monitor significant metrics which can then provide leadership with valuable insights into the health of an organization or team. At each of my three most recent jobs, I’ve worked through a book called Traction by […]
While running operations at Sandhills Development, one responsibility of mine was shipping things to our distributed team. Most of those things ended up being branded gear of one kind of another, or sometimes special gifts. For example, new hires generally received a “care package” which contained things like t-shirts, hats, and other items with our […]
At a recent job, I was solely responsible for Total Rewards which included designing and maintaining all employee perks. As a self-proclaimed people-first organization, we poured a lot into the employee experience. I helped institute a wide array of perks and benefits, many of which were typical such as a 401k plan and free access […]
In 2019, I was handed responsibility for everything pertaining to employee compensation at the small distributed software company I was working for at the time. Prior to that point, compensation was managed solely by the company’s founder in a spreadsheet and there was no formal system governing pay. Everyone’s pay was negotiated between individual employees […]
I’ve done lots of podcasting in the past. Interview shows, topical education shows, advice shows, etc. Just a few weeks ago I started something new with a couple local friends and I’m absolutely loving it. The background: Last year (2020) two friends of mine and I started a group text in which we would talk […]
In the summer of 2019, when I took on the role of Director of Operations at Sandhills Development, the company had no framework for employee growth and no clear strategy for employee compensation. Changing that became a short term priority of mine, in spite of the fact that I’d never previously created anything of the […]
Well that was a garbage filled burning train wreck. I almost dare not look back for fear of being Medusa’d by the wretched catastrophic turd buffet that was last year. I’ve never written a year in review post before. Why start now? Well a lot happened, that’s why. A lot that I haven’t talked about […]
I run operations at a software company called Sandhills Development and one of my responsibilities is planning our occasional team retreats. I wrote about some of them before including our 2017 All Hands and our 2019 All Hands. For the past few years our fully distributed team has been getting together in-person at least once […]
On August 29th, 2017, our daughter Abigail was born. We brought her home from the hospital a couple days later and, though I can’t recall the exact day, were very soon after surprised to discover a stray cat on our doorstep. Now, we’d been living in the same house here in Jackson for over eight […]
I should post more often. When so much time has passed it’s difficult to summarize all that has transpired. I don’t even know where to begin. I’ll start with a little context for the current situation. Back in early 2017, Ashley and I had been among the eligible and waiting adoptive families at a local […]
