Kai Kirk Email & Phone Number

Newport Beach, California, Us

At BLAZE we focus on building great tech that has the primary result to either save our customers money (decrease expenses) or make them more money (increase revenue). Retail is hard and your tech should work hard for you. I enjoy working with a great team of APMs and devs to help me deliver the best tech.The Customer Care and Support teams roll up under the CPO at BLAZE to ensure we get quick feedback from our customers, listen to them, and build a better product as a result. The BLAZE ACT, Onboarding, and Support teams are a phenomenal group that really cares about the customers and repeatedly score close to 100% CSAT from our customers.I love the BLAZE team, and love developing the leaders around us.As with any startup, I have worn many other simultaneous hats ranging across HR, expense management, compliance, acquisition project management, AR, payroll, SOC audit, AWS infrastructure, web hosting, etc.

Managing Partner of Head Space Distribution and the Head Space Alchemy Brand. A Top cannabis brand in New Mexico.Provide leadership on systems and processes put in place to effectively scale our organization across aspects of sales, fulfillment, accounting, and AR.

Private Equity Investment vehicle created to raise $5mm for a vertically integrated Cannabis facility in Central California. Expanded investment into Manufacturing Operations in New Mexico.

Vertical hemp operation in New Mexico with close to 700,000 square feet of greenhouse space and 100,000 square feet of warehouse. Operations in plant genetics (clone, seed, and tissue culture), extraction, distillation, formulations, and R&D facilities with local university.

Mesilla Park, New Mexico, Us

Seed to sale cultivation software for the cannabis industry, for cultivators, by cultivators. Blaze Solutions acquired Flo Management cultivation software in June 2019.

One of two founders to start the business. Took a very effective profiling tool that was formerly utilized on paper and placed it online. -Built systems utilizing a LEMP stack, with optimized MariaDB, and front end reverse proxy for load balancing/failover.-Created system requirements for software development project, sourced overseas developers to build, and worked with them to build the system from scratch. -Responsible for all technical aspects of the company, systems, and products.

Kirk Consulting provides common sense workshops based on the needs of a team. These needs are divined through the use of the Personal MatriX Profile (PXP). The PXP provides a detailed view of an individual's persona and allows quick insight into factors that would hold a person back, cause conflict, or inefficiency. The workplace has become an increasingly complex place with with complex people talking about how complex it is. Common sense workshops focus on core components of business and relationships that are often overlooked by today's operating systems. Can our workshops provide any value to you or your company? Contact us for a free PXP assessment and see.

Owned and managed a portfolio of single family rental homes in the DFW area.Closed out portfolio for 207% ROI with a holding period of only 4 years.

Lead investor and owner of 41 unit apartment community in Oak Lawn (Dallas area).-Selected investment-Located funding-Turned over property in three years for an ROI of over 90%

Richardson, Texas, Us

IT Director is responsible for Enterprise Services, Data Center Operations, NOC services, user tech support, and procurement/purchasing. Three data centers are managed by the data center team. Supported VMWARE environment consists of approx. 1500 production VMWARE virtual machines running Red Hat or Windows with database platforms of MS SQL, MySQL, Oracle, and PostgreSQL. NOC Services provides 24/7 monitoring of systems through MS SCOM platform. -Ops and Run Books – Each of my reporting managers is responsible for delivering an Operations (Ops) Book and a Run Book. The Ops Book is delivered every other week and contains key information such as the status of all projects, metrics by which the managers run their teams, risks to the business, top work generators, and significant achievements. The Run Book is kept current with periodic updates and contains details about how the managers actually run their organization with references to policies and procedures. The main purposes of these books are to: provide a clear picture to upper management about how the teams are being run, provide the information needed to judge if a manager can take on more, and to provide for an easy transition if a manager is promoted or leaves the company. -Data Center Efficiency – Through careful analysis and small changes, reduced the power consumption of the data center by close to 25%. Achieved at a minimal cost with the use of better airflow direction and through better management of 160 tons of cooling systems for the facility. -Fiscal Responsibility – Reviewed and evaluated all contracts to further cost decreases. Successfully re-negotiated a contract with our co-location provider Disaster Recovery. This resulted in a savings of approximately $420,000 over a twelve month period. Saved or avoided over $800,000 in costs for the 2011 review period, more than paying for the position for many years.

Richardson, Texas, Us

Cloud Services was a newly formed branch of RealPage that provided IT as a service. Services were provided on many levels that varied from basic colocation services to total IT outsourcing. Enterprise services provided support for all internal core applications that served RealPage employees. -Trailblazing – Worked closely with the COO to design initial service offerings. Formed an engineering team to support the new Cloud products. Designed and built hosting environments from the ground up for each customer, setting standards along the way. As customers were integrated, quickly documented their environments so they could be effectively supported. Managed multiple projects simultaneously, each requiring constant customer interaction to ensure satisfaction and coordination of outage windows. Set up weekly meetings with sales team to better manage customer expectations and ensure we were speaking to the customer with one consistent voice. -Data Center Migration – Successfully ran the project to migrate a large customer from Washington State to RealPage data center in Carrollton, TX. At the start of the project the customer was severely lacking in documentation and environmental knowledge. Through a thorough discovery process and the utilization of some very bright engineers, we were able to overcome these limitations. The customer was successfully migrated and only incurred downtime during scheduled outage windows. -Overseas Staff – In addition to local engineers, the Enterprise team consisted of remote engineers in two other U.S. States and two engineers in India. Upon taking over the team, recognized that these engineers were being underutilized and were not regarded very highly by their peers at the corporate office. To resolve this, weekly video conference calls were scheduled to build the team environment. In addition, the remote engineers began working tickets from the same queues so the local engineers could see they were also pulling their weight.

San Diego, California, Us

The Director of Network Operations serves as primary leadership over Enterprise services, data center operations, network services, purchasing, PC Support, and security services. Teams under the management of the Director of Network Operations were stationed both in Grand Prairie, Texas and San Diego, California. Full responsibility over IT budget and all projects. All teams supported up to 2500 employees nationwide at 250 sites. -Data Center Migration – Successfully project planned and performed a data center migration from Grand Prairie to Carrollton. Executive management only provided 45 days for this migration. Within the 45 day window the data center was moved with only downtime during standard maintenance windows. During the process the facility was taken from 0% virtualized to over 50% virtualized. This reduced the footprint of physical servers from 120 down to 55. All moves and changes were performed with a full back-out plan that would allow for immediate restoration of service if the move were to fail. The project came in under budget which allowed room for bonus payout to the highly dedicated engineers. -Policies and Procedures – Established policies and procedures for the department where there previously were none. The use of the policies and procedures allowed for much quicker onboarding of new employees, greatly decreased audit risk, and decreased risk to our systems. Additionally, my teams created clear user guides to be utilized as self-service tools for our end users. -Budgeting – Created and managed an annual budget of $3M (excluding headcount). Put processes in place to track actual purchases to budget items to both ensure we stayed within budget and to ease the budgeting processes each successive year.

San Diego, California, Us

The IT Manager is responsible for managing PC Support, Data Center, Purchasing, and network services for the Western division. The western division support needs consisted of over 1200 employees at 140 locations. -Desktop Support – 130 of our 140 locations were apartment communities. The average lifecycle of a community at Fairfield was around three years. This resulted in us turning up and disposing of approximately three to four properties each month. When a new property was turned up, it had to be ready to go day one, but we were unable to have equipment arrive prior to day one. Prior to the new processes it would take two to three days for this to occur. By placing these new processes in place and staging equipment, the properties were turned up within the first day. -Data Center Rebuild – At the time I took over Western division IT, the existing data center was running on 5+ year old Compaq servers that were under FMV lease. Even though we were capital constrained, I was able to replace all servers in the facility with new Dell servers for less than the current lease payments. New servers were purchased under a three year lease with $1 buy-out. -CLARiiON Implementation – Fairfield previously utilized only direct attached storage. Implemented a SAN infrastructure utilizing EMC CLARiiON CX series arrays with redundant Brocade switching fabric. This resulted in reduction of over-provisioning of storage on future systems and greatly reduced administration time spent when more space was required. The older DAS arrays were re-purposed to build a test environment to allow for thorough testing of our application upgrades.

San Diego, California, Us

San Diego, California, Us

Irvine, Ca, Us

Mechanical Engineering

Business, Business Management