Most of my career happened before I had a plan for it.
I came up through kitchens. Spent years as an executive chef and food & beverage director running operations across multiple properties. The work was demanding and immediate and I loved it. But the thing that kept showing up in every success I had wasn’t a recipe or a system. It was a person. Someone I’d worked alongside, mentored, and promoted into a role they didn’t know they were ready for. Eventually I realized the part of the job I was best at wasn’t running kitchens. It was building the people who would run them next.
So I went into teaching. I taught at several culinary schools while going back to school myself to finish a degree. That’s where I took my first online classes and saw two things at once: enormous potential and terrible execution. The technology existed to reach students who would never set foot on a traditional campus. But almost nobody was deploying it well. That gap became an obsession. My business capstone project was a blueprint for an online culinary school. A couple of years later, I partnered with Auguste Escoffier to actually build it.
Everyone in the industry said you couldn’t teach cooking online. I went back to first principles. What is culinary school actually supposed to accomplish? What competencies does a graduate need? Which of those require a physical kitchen, and which don’t? When you strip away tradition and ask what the student actually needs, the answer looks different than what the catalog says. We built a program around that answer. It reached students in 45 countries and fundamentally changed the conversation about what vocational education could look like online.
That same approach has driven everything since. I’ve spent the last 14 years in executive leadership applying first-principles thinking to institutional growth, technology strategy, accreditation, AI implementation, and the hard operational work of building programs that produce career outcomes. Today I serve as Chief Business Strategy Officer at CBD College in Los Angeles, where I oversee all revenue-generating and student-facing operations.