Elan Industries designs and manufactures fine appliance controls for commercial and high-end residential appliances. As Director of Operations, I contribute to the growth and success of Elan by directing day-to-day operations, optimizing core operational capabilities, and incorporating new ideas, processes, and technologies. As a servant leader, I take care of my delightful and talented colleagues who care for the company and our clients. As a synergist and enabler, I focus on strengthening our capabilities, adding value to our offerings, scaling, and enabling growth. Our operations team turns complex electrical designs into controls that are the heart of all appliances. Everyone on the operations team is kind, talented, and client-centered. We passionately care about the quality of our products and pleasing our clients, who we consider our friends. During the global pandemic and supply chain crunch, the operations team kept parts flowing to our customers even during the most challenging times. It was a beautiful thing. Please get in touch with me if you’re interested in learning more about our talented operations team. I have plenty of inspiring stories to share. I am honored to represent and support this brilliant, talented team.

Creata - A vibrant and imaginative brand activation agency that provides product development and digital services to distinguished brands worldwide. Clients: McDonald’s, Coke, Kellogg’s and Samsung For the past 11 years, I’ve orchestrated continuous innovation for the $3.5B McDonald’s Happy Meal brand and executed unique innovation projects for a variety of other outstanding brands. I’ve led global teams to research and develop products, services, technology, materials, and business models with excellent product-market fit. I’ve directed and performed all facets of innovation including technology evaluation, market trend analysis, innovation strategy, ideation, innovation pipeline management, business model development, startup collaboration, design thinking, digital enhancements, creative problem solving, and the end-to-end production of complex initiatives for global product development programs.

As a leading engineer, product developer, and project manager, I was responsible for dozens of highly visible, year-long projects and the development of over one billion McDonald’s Happy Meal toys. In this client-facing and project management-intensive role, the Senior Product Engineer is responsible for managing all product development activities from initial concept development to design, engineering, tooling, manufacturing, and delivery. Additional responsibilities included client reviews, supplier negotiation, scheduling, overseeing the global supply chain, and maintaining great relationships with such partners as Pixar, Disney, and Marvel. As Senior Product Engineer, I enjoyed daily cross- functional collaboration with artists, designers, sculptors, engineers, and account service colleagues from all around the world.

Offering a full range of engineering and product development services, Prototech Engineering was a bold pioneer in the field of 3D printing, rapid prototyping, and product development.With a well-designed production system and a talented team, the best thing a VP can do is to enable good things to happen and optimize the culture. I created a positive and progressive culture where our talented team of 35 engineers and product developers could deliver excellent services to leading engineering firms and product development teams at Fortune 500 companies. I designed and implemented a project management and scheduling system that increased our throughput and accelerated our delivery times by 20-65% resulting in 21% annual core product revenue growth despite plateauing industry growth and an industry wide price decline of 20%.

In the fast-growing field of rapid product development, rapid change was the only constant. New technology and rapidly changing manufacturing methods challenged everyone at every level. As director of marketing, I was responsible for helping the engineering community adopt new technology while enabling agile product development and reducing our client’s time to market. I led a variety of marketing initiatives including educational seminars, field visits, advertising, trade shows, technology demonstrations, direct marketing, website development, customer research, industry research, and consultative sales. Using design thinking, we spent time observing and listening to our clients. Then, we designed solutions that matched their needs and solved their problems. This process led us to create a new product that grew to be 40% of total company revenue within one year. This simple, yet effective approach created great product market fit for our customers, differentiated our offering, and fueled our steady growth.