Jim Buchanan Email & Phone Number

Irving, Texas, United States

Dallas/Fort Worth Area

Soggy Zoggy Aquatics was formed when my wife was asked to put together a proposal for a city swim program. We built a profitable business that has grown year after year. We built a website, evaluated back office software for class management, hired and trained staff, developed and documented workflows, developed metrics, lesson plans and training programs. We love making a difference in the lives of our clients and serve the most ethnically diverse zip code in the United States. It is tremendously satisfying to take a child or adult from terror to mastery. I’m most proud of our staff and that 85% of our customers consistently rate our program experience as either Very Satisfied or Extremely Satisfied.

Addison, Texas

Three weeks after I changed industries and came on board, the owner left to go backpacking in the wilderness, leaving me, the sole employee, in charge of all aspects of his business for two weeks. Day one, I inherited five construction projects including a troubled $2M design build boiler project where the equipment the customer needed did not meet outdated government specs since our more modern fire tube boilers had electronic, not mechanical safety control systems. Together, over the next five years, we grew the company from two full time employees to 20 staff, and sales from $500k to $11M annually, including the period owner left to hike the Appalachian trail. What began as a steam services company exclusively serving Federal facilities (primarily as a prime contractor), grew to self perform electrical and mechanical projects with commercial and government contracts. Initially I had responsibility for all operations of the business except outside sales. I did bookkeeping, payroll, project management, risk management, CRM, IT, and proposal support. As we grew, I trained, delegated, and focused on operations and project cost modelling. We developed metrics and hired staff. Our management system evolved from hallway conversations and email to KPIs. As my role shifted, when awarded a multiyear service agreement, I proposed, then built an in-house mechanical team which increased both quality and responsiveness to the customer, and quadrupled profits for the project. It also made us more competitive for future bids and lowered execution risk. What I most enjoyed was the start up spirit and the uncapped opportunity to grow limited only by our imaginations. Even though, in the initial years, neither me or my staff had formal training for their job functions, we made it all work, They were a delight to coach and see grow! My opportunity ended when the owner sold the company and the new owner brought in his own management team.

Dallas, Texas

In 1999, the DISD was the 12th largest school district with $1.2B budget with about 80 different departments serving over 152,000 students. I worked in a 4 person team to address internal management issues. We developed and led the 5 year strategic planning process, coaching campuses, departments and the leadership teams in developing project charters, action plans and milestones. In Phase I, we spent a lot of time teaching educators how to understand test data, and department heads key concepts in project management. This evolved into developing an Oracle online management portal based on the Harvard Balanced Scorecard. In it we tracked KPIs and wrote summary reports for the CEO and Board of Governance. In the second phase of this project, our group redesigned the employee evaluation system to support the strategic plan. The third phase of this project was developing requirements and piloting a data warehouse for both management and academic data. In this role, I did some APEX development, but primarily worked with our DBA and developer on requirements and testing. When school shootings started to become more common, as one of many ad hoc projects, we were asked to develop and implement an emergency readiness program. This project eventually expanded into a new department. I was promoted and worked full time in this new role as both a trainer and evaluator.These work experiences for great places to learn about working with stakeholders who had diverse and competing interests, and to work with some extraordinary statisticians and data analysts.Training Courses: Oracle 10g DBA, Oracle AS Portal 10g, Datawarehousing Fundamentals, Datawarehouse Database Design, SQL Tuning Workshop

Worldwide

After graduating from the Air Force Academy, I worked at Los Alamos National Lab for six weeks while waiting for helicopter school. I assisted an electrical engineer developing step motor controls for the SALT II missile verification detector. After graduating from helicopter school I spent four years flying crews and parts to missile silos as well as search and rescue. I worked my way from the copilot to instructor, then evaluator pilot. When I had enough experience, I cross-trained into special operations where our mission was to fly low level at night inserting SEALS, marines, Green Berets, and classified units into target areas, to ships or in the ocean. With experience, I was selected as part of the planning team for developing training exercises with our allies and sister services. These exercises were typically three weeks long in various locations around the world, and cost between $500k to $3M.

Electrical Engineering, Engineering

Activities and Societies: Wings of Blue Parachute Team, Mountaineering Club

Master Of Science (Ms), Business Administration And Management, General