Learning to choose which broken machine mattered most

My first job was to decide which broken copier mattered most. In June 1993, a month after finishing an industrial-engineering degree at Kesterline Institute of Technology, I joined Brannockfield Office Systems in Dayton, Ohio, as a dispatch coordinator. Calls arrived by telephone, engineers rang in from customers' offices and I tracked them with coloured pins on a map of Ohio and eastern Indiana. A law firm facing a filing deadline and a school with a broken fax machine might call within a minute of each other. Nobody had written down how to choose. I learnt to ask what would happen if each call waited two hours, and to tell the second customer honestly when someone would arrive.

By 1996 I supervised the dispatch room and its nine coordinators. The work showed me how quickly a good engineer could be worn down by a schedule that ignored the drive between calls. Our most capable engineer resigned after a winter of sixty-hour weeks that the monthly report had recorded as productive. I had no authority over the pay plan, but I began recording travel and waiting time separately so that the service manager could see what the report concealed.

In September 1998 I moved to Pellwarren Retail Systems in Columbus, which sold and installed point-of-sale systems for regional grocers and pharmacies. I managed installation projects and later the whole installation group. A grocery chain converting forty stores over three weekends taught me that a schedule is only as reliable as the least-prepared person on the overnight crew. I started rehearsing each new store layout in our warehouse before the first conversion. It added a week to every project and removed most of the Sunday-morning calls from store managers who could not open their lanes.

Mardonley Depot Repair in Louisville hired me in April 2005 to run its depot. We repaired scanners, receipt printers and payment terminals that retailers shipped to us in bulk. Depot work is quieter than the field, but its economics are just as unforgiving. A device sitting on a shelf awaiting a part is one a store cannot use, and the customer pays for spares to cover the gap. I reorganised the benches around fault families instead of customer accounts. Repair cycles shortened, though two account managers who had promised named technicians to their clients were unhappy with me for months.

From November 2010 I led customer support and implementation at Ruthvane Software in Chicago, which sold ordering and back-office software to restaurant groups. It was my first software company. The support desk was understaffed, and new customers waited up to fourteen weeks to go live after signing. Sales counted a signature as success; the customer counted the go-live. I asked for the implementation queue to be reported to the executive team every week, with the oldest unstarted contract at the top. That change made the backlog a shared problem rather than my department's private embarrassment.

I joined Brisendale Field Services in February 2016 as senior vice president of service delivery, responsible for dispatch, remote resolution and depot repair. Three years later I opened our centre in Querétaro after a long argument with myself about which work belonged there. Routine daytime troubleshooting moved; night escalations and the dispatch decisions themselves stayed in Indianapolis, where the person deciding could reach a technician's supervisor directly.

I became chief operating officer in March 2021, two months after Amberlode Capital Partners acquired its majority holding. Our sponsor brought sharper financial reporting and an appetite for acquisitions. I brought a habit of asking what a promise costs the person who has to keep it. Those perspectives usually sit comfortably together. When they do not, my job is to put the operating consequence before the chief executive and the board in figures they can test, and then carry out their decision.

Colleagues would probably say I am stubborn about two things: early escalation and honest capacity. A dispatcher who opens a major incident and turns out to be wrong should hear thanks, not criticism. A sales proposal that relies on technicians nobody has hired is not yet a plan. I hold to both even when they cost revenue.

I have never been a director of a commercial company. I sit, unpaid, on the board of Wrenmoor Skills Alliance, an Indianapolis non-profit that prepares people for technician careers. A first commercial board seat would be a new responsibility, and I would approach it as one.

Open to Board appointments

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