Who You Will Be Working With

A Curious Mind
 

When I was a kid, I read Stephen Hawking for fun.
 

I sat in the front row of every class — not to impress the teacher, but because I wanted to be in it. Close enough that nothing got lost between the front of the room and me. School didn't come easy at first, but I cared enough to keep at it, and by high school I was in every honors and AP class I could get into.
 

I never wanted to be good at only one thing, though. I played volleyball, traveled, and was always chasing something new to learn — especially anything that made my life, or someone else's, easier.
 

I graduated from The Ohio State University with a Bachelor of Science in Physics and minors in astronomy and international relations.  Physics didn't teach me a set of facts so much as a way of thinking: break a hard problem into its parts, figure out which part actually matters, and never accept an answer just because it looks right.
 

I still work that way.
 

A Career Built Around Solving Problems
 

My first job out of college was as a Software Analyst with a defense contractor, Sparta — five years contracted into Northrop Grumman's lab, building flight simulators for the U.S. military.
 

My job, boiled down: make sure what a pilot saw on the simulator screen matched what would actually happen in a real aircraft. I chased down latency problems and built the analysis that kept those simulators honest enough to train people on, worldwide.

I didn't know it then, but that's still the job: make sure the technology matches how the real work actually happens.
 

Then I stepped away for about ten years to raise our three boys.
 

Coming back was its own puzzle. My clearance had lapsed, and defense work meant a lab and someone else's schedule. IT was the door that was open — and it turned out to be the right one.
 

I spent four years as Director of IT for a nonprofit running multiple churches and systems.  I led the migration of the organization's entire database into a new system — every field mapped so no history was lost — running the project with my IT team and an outside partner, and delivering the staff training myself. COVID hit in the middle of it, so I also rolled out Microsoft 365 and taught the staff to work and teach remotely. And while both were underway, the organization built a new school: I led the technology side and worked alongside the CFO across the wider construction project.
 

Later I came back to lead technology for their school, where I owned a $200,000-plus annual IT budget, negotiated the vendor contracts, ran the physical and digital security systems, and managed more than twenty different software platforms. I also rebuilt a hiring and onboarding process that had never really been designed to fit their needs.
 

Somewhere along the way I taught a year of high school honors physics — a completely different room than I was used to. There's nothing quite like watching someone reach the moment where physics stops being homework and starts being genuinely interesting.
 

Knowing Where My Knowledge Ends
 

At the school we had close to seven hundred people on the network every day — students, teachers, staff, and guests. In an environment like that, someone is going to click a bad link eventually. That isn't a design flaw. It's arithmetic.
 

I'm not a cybersecurity expert, and I wanted it done right, so I brought in an outside firm that does nothing else. Together, we wrote our network security policies, managed the network, and built protocols to catch a problem early and lock it down fast. When something did happen, it was contained in minutes — and we followed it with training, not blame.
 

I've come to believe the smartest thing you can do is know exactly where your own knowledge ends, and then hire well past it.
 

That's still how I work. I could fix your printers or replace your IT provider — but that's not where I add the most value. What I bring is the 10,000-foot view: a partner who helps you decide what's worth doing, in what order, and why, then brings in the right specialists when the work calls for hands that aren't mine.
 

Technology With A Human Purpose
 

Here's what I believe, and it isn't the standard consultant line.
 

Technology is a tool. It should never replace real human connection.
 

I love to read, and I want the physical book in my hands — I want to turn the pages. No app is going to change that.

The same thinking applies in a business. If having a real person answer the phone and know your clients by name is part of what you want your company to be, that's a legitimate reason to keep it — not an inefficiency to be optimized away. AI could handle those calls faster and cheaper. That doesn't automatically make it the right move. And if automating it is the right move for you, I'll help you do it well.
 

That's the whole point. The decision should follow what you actually value, not what the technology happens to be capable of. Don't adopt something just because it exists — and don't keep something just because you always have.
 

This matters most with AI right now. One piece of my last role as an IT director was running AI training for our staff: how to write a good prompt, how to spot slop, where the tool's limits actually sit, and how to review what comes back with real discernment. Because AI has a knowledge cutoff. It was written by people. And it gets things wrong with total confidence.
 

I help people use technology with confidence, not blind trust. I show them how to ask better questions, check the answers, and make the result genuinely usable.
 

Why I Started Core Catalyst Group
 

I worked in a small school, so everyone wore several hats. I got pulled into all kinds of projects and problems that had nothing to do with IT, and I was glad to — that's how a small team works. But a pattern showed up: when something needed figuring out, people came to me.
 

I had real freedom to run technology the way I believed it should be run. Major budget decisions still went up for approval, as they should — and I didn't always get the answer I wanted. So I'd adjust, and make the plan work anyway.
 

The technology conversation and the business conversation turned out to be the same conversation — and most organizations don't have anyone whose job it is to hold both.
 

That's the work I'm best at. It's what people have told me, unprompted, in every role I've had: that I can take something complicated and explain it plainly, without the overwhelm.
 

I'm also, by nature, a details person. I'm the one who reads the whole contract, questions the assumption, and asks what happens in the bad scenario — usually exactly what you want in someone advising you on a large decision. But not every conversation needs all of it, so I'll ask how much detail is useful to you rather than assume. Some clients want the whole picture. Others want the recommendation and the reasoning. Both are good answers.
 

Starting Core Catalyst Group let me do more of what I enjoy most — solving problems — for more organizations, over time, than any single employer could put in front of me.
 

Staying small is the design, not a limitation. Working with a handful of clients at a time is the only way to know a business well enough to genuinely advise it, and it means fit matters more than volume. I'm not looking for a quick project and a final invoice — I'd rather stay with a few organizations for years, long enough to be the person you call before the next big decision.
 

That's what I want to be for a client: your first call. Not the person who does everything, but the one who knows your business, gives you a straight answer, and knows who to bring in when the work needs hands that aren't mine.
 

Deliberately small. Genuinely good. That's the whole plan.
 

Who I Love Working With
 

I work with all kinds of organizations. Some have no technology leadership at all. Some have an IT person or an outside provider keeping things running, and still need someone who can step back, see the whole picture, and connect it to where the business is actually going. Some know exactly what's wrong. Plenty don't — they just know something isn't working the way it should, and they're tired of guessing.

The clients I do my best work with have a few things in common. They'd rather hear an honest answer than a comfortable one. They'll give me the time to find the actual root of a problem instead of patching the symptom. They come in with an open mind, looking for a change that lasts rather than a quick fix. And once we land on a plan, we carry it out together.

Across my career I've watched capable organizations spend real money on technology that never quite delivered — not because anyone made a reckless decision, but because nobody had time or the right person to ask the right questions first. That's the work I do now, and it's why I start every relationship the same way.
 

If that sounds like you, let's start with a conversation.  About 10 minutes. No cost, no pressure.