My story
The prognosis
I was born with severe to profound hearing loss in both ears. When the doctors explained what that meant, they were clear about my future. I would never learn to speak. I would communicate with sign language, attend schools for the deaf, and spend my life on the outside of a world built on conversation.
My dad listened to all of it. Then he decided they were wrong.
My dad's plan
There was no program for what he wanted, so he built one. Every day he sat with me and drilled sounds, then words, then sentences. He recruited volunteers, therapists, and anyone willing to help. I wore hearing aids that gave me just enough to work with, and I learned to fill in the rest by watching lips, faces, and body language.
It took more than 20 years of speech therapy. I fought through a stutter and a lisp. Some words still trip me up, and I've learned to laugh about it. But I talk. I talk a lot. And I learned something early that still drives everything I do: the gap between what people say is possible and what is actually possible is usually just work that nobody wanted to do.
“The gap between what people say is possible and what is actually possible is usually just work that nobody wanted to do.”
Learning to read a room
When you can't rely on your ears, you study people. I learned to read a room before I knew that was a skill. Who's engaged, who's checked out, who wants to talk and hasn't found the moment.
A mentor once sent me to a mall to stop strangers and ask them to fill out surveys, because he thought it would push me out of my comfort zone. It did. Later I spent about a year pitching sunrooms to shoppers at Sam's Club. I heard "no" more times than I can count, and every one of them made me better. Rejection stopped feeling like a verdict and started feeling like data.
Building things
I started my first business, a landscaping company, as a teenager. Since then I've built and run ventures in restaurants, technology sales, health and wellness, and more. Some worked. A few didn't, and those taught me the most.
I joined qBotica, an award-winning enterprise AI company, to build its marketing from scratch. Today I lead marketing there as part of the executive team. I led the go-to-market for DoqumentAI, and qBotica has made the Inc. 5000 list of America's fastest-growing companies four years in a row. I still build on the side as a co-founder and advisor to a few growing companies.
The classroom
Teaching started as a favor for a friend. It turned into one of the things I love most. I've taught at Paradise Valley Community College for over a decade, and today I'm a Professor of Business and Marketing there, teaching leadership, management, and marketing. I was named Outstanding Faculty of the Year, and I hold a B.S. in Marketing and Management and an MBA.
Watching a quiet student find their voice never gets old. I know exactly how far that can go.
Paying it forward
Canine Companions matched me with Plato, my first hearing dog, and later with Annie. Hearing dogs are one of the real reasons I have the life I have, so I give back where I can. I served as a chapter president for Canine Companions, chaired the DogFest Walk 'N Roll in Phoenix, and founded Plato's Pedalers, a cycling team that rode across Iowa in RAGBRAI to raise money for the organization.
I serve on the board of the Diversity Leadership Alliance, where I chair the Youth Leadership Academy. We've helped develop more than 150 underserved high school students and administered over $200,000 in college scholarships. I've also served on the board of CASA Academy, a Phoenix charter school, and helped The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society with fundraising campaigns.
Hearing for the first time
In 2023, after a lifetime of hearing aids and lip reading, I had cochlear implant surgery. The surgery was the easy part. The next two years were brain training and hearing therapy, teaching my brain to make sense of sounds it had never processed.
Today I have 92% speech recognition with my implant. I hear music clearly. I listen to audiobooks. I hear birds outside, conversations across a room, and my daughters laughing in the next room. A lot of the world is new to me, and I don't take a single sound for granted.
“I spent decades learning to be heard without being able to hear. Now I get to do both.”
Why I speak
Somewhere along the way, students and strangers started telling me my story helped them push through their own. So I started telling it on purpose.
Every audience has someone carrying something nobody else can see. My job is to show them that the thing they think is holding them back can become the thing that sets them apart. That's what "Be uncommon. Become exceptional." means to me. I speak to companies, associations, schools, and nonprofits about confidence, leadership, teams, entrepreneurship, and staying valuable in the age of AI. And every week I write about building companies, marketing, leadership, AI, and wellness in The Uncommon Perspective on LinkedIn.
Off stage
I'm a husband, a dad of two fast-growing daughters, an avid cyclist, and always up for an adventure. Most of my best ideas still show up on a long ride.