Most people who study operations have never had to make payroll while a system failed around them. My path ran the other direction.
I started in the numbers — accounting and finance degrees from West Virginia University — and went to work where numbers meet chaos: hospitality turnarounds. As task-force GM of a struggling airport hotel, I restructured the property to a 30-point jump in guest satisfaction and the #1 ranking among 300 corporate-owned properties. The lesson that stuck wasn't about hotels. It was that performance problems are almost never people problems — they're design problems wearing people costumes.
In 2017 I moved into healthcare education at West Virginia Junior College, where I now serve as Assistant Director of Curriculum Development & Innovation across six campuses in three states — building academic programs, navigating accreditation, and teaching the next generation of healthcare professionals. Along the way I grew WVJC's accounting program from infancy into its largest business program.
In 2021 I became an operator in healthcare myself, co-founding More Allure Beauty Clinic — a medical practice spanning hair restoration, medical weight loss, and aesthetics, now in its second location. Running a clinic while teaching healthcare operations is a daily experiment in everything I research: scheduling, no-shows, capacity, staffing, and the gap between the plan and what people actually do.
That gap is why I'm completing a PhD in Business at Virginia Tech, and why I wrote The 12 Laws of Healthcare Operations. Healthcare doesn't fail for the reasons we blame. It fails by design — and design can be fixed.