It started on Chevron's oil leases, where my title was Lean Six Sigma Facilitator and the job was running the program across Midway-Sunset, Cymric McKittrick, and Kern River. I carried ten to fifteen projects at a time and documented savings alongside Chevron engineers, construction reps, and superintendents.
I spent the next decade in industrial products. At Rexnord I led telemetry-enabled IoT programs from edge hardware through cloud platforms. Along the way I became a co-inventor on a patent for IoT water management, granted in May 2026.
Rexnord's water business became Zurn in 2021, and Zurn merged with Elkay in July 2022. The combined company had two different new-product processes and no agreement on which one survived. I sat in both, built the one that replaced them, and defined who owned what across product management, engineering, marketing, and supply chain. It went live the following January, and I trained the business units on it through the spring. More than fifty programs across the merged company ran through it, a separate count from the ones I directed.
On the commercial side, I wrote the launch playbook that carries a product from design freeze to specified, stocked, and sold. I also went after the verticals and segments we had never won.
In every one of those jobs, the constraint turned out to be the operating system nobody wrote down. It was the handoff with no owner, the decision that waits four days for a meeting, and the knowledge that lives in one person's head.
In 2023 I started building with AI daily, six to eight hours at a stretch, mostly to find out where it breaks. At Litus it became the bid engine described above. On my own time it became shouldidive.com, a live ocean-conditions map for the California coast fed by a daily satellite pipeline. Both taught me what the shop floor already knew: the model is rarely the hard part.
Writing that operating system down is the work now, in factories, panel shops, and founder-led companies. AI goes inside it only where the seams are governed, under the same rule SMBai runs on.
