My Story

The room where it started

My career started in a room that explained everything that came after.

I walked into a small IT department as the 3rd person, at a company growing so fast its systems and processes couldn't keep up. Servers sat on the same bench where PCs were repaired, cables ran across the floor that doubled as the walkway to the lunchroom, and the days ran on patchwork, just-enough solutions because there was never a moment to catch a breath. It was simply a point in time in a fast-growing company's evolution. For me, the timing was ideal. It meant endless opportunity to get my hands into absolutely everything.

Over 11 years I worked my way up to the Head of IT for a major North American retailer, a $250 million business with over 100 outlets, helping professionalize, standardize, and modernize as we went. That cluttered room became a proper data centre. And the capstone of my tenure went far beyond any room: leading the implementation of a new enterprise ERP platform, the largest capital investment and process reengineering in company history. We took systems and processes bursting at the seams and, while keeping everything running, transformed the entire business onto a modern, efficient platform, ahead of schedule and under budget, with efficiencies felt across the whole company, from the point of sale to the warehouse floor.

The part I'm most proud of has nothing to do with the technology. Early on, a Dale Carnegie course left me with a principle that has shaped everything since: people support a world they help create. I led the IT team by building the systems with them, not handing systems to them. Years after I left, the company never replaced my role, and the team kept running the department on their own, continuing to iterate and improve on what we had built together. I heard about it from a former colleague long after, and you could hear the pride in their voice. That taught me what leadership actually is: it's measured by what survives your absence.

A framed Titanium Boss Award presented to Chad Richardson, covered in handwritten thank-you notes from his team. — The Titanium Boss Award, my team's send-off twist on the Golden Mouse Award I'd created years before, a staple of our culture for recognizing peer accomplishments.

When someone does something good, applaud! You will make two people happy.
- Samuel Goldwyn -

That arc, chaos into harmony, turned out to be the signature move of my whole career. I've run it multiple times since.

Starting from zero

I always knew I wanted to build my own thing, and more than 15 years ago, well before it was fashionable, I had the idea of being able to work from anywhere.

The path there was not a straight line. It ran through a conference I attended purely for inspiration, and a conversation with a man who matched people to businesses for a living. That led me to the founder of a translation company in the U.S. who wanted to bring it to Canada.

What drew me in was never translation itself. It was the same thing that drew me to that server room and enterprise ERP systems: complex, high-volume work that needed systems and process to become scalable. Same muscle, new domain.

Starting with 0 clients and $0 in revenue, the part that humbled me was sales. I had spent my whole career on the buyer's side of the desk, and the first 3 years showed it: I sold as much in my 13th month as I had in my entire first year! I stuck with it, found my stride, and eventually grew to lead the organization in sales over multiple years across North America. I share that because it shaped how I work today. Nothing about building a business is easy, and the hard-won parts are where the greatest learning comes from.

During those years the business grew into a top 40 North American language services provider serving clients from Marvel to Schneider Electric, with the work I'm proudest of including providing language access for Indigenous speakers during the Federal Indian Day Schools class action, making sure every class member could engage in their own language. In that same stretch, we created a fully managed SaaS workflow that keeps clients' multilingual websites updated automatically, cutting their time and effort by 30% or more, an early taste of where my work was heading.

Client testimonial on the Federal Indian Day Schools language access work.

The hard years, and the rebuild

Not every chapter is a highlight reel.

2023 threw every punch at once: client crises, ballooning receivables, injuries that kept me from the sports that keep me sane, and losses in the family. The business took real damage through 2024 and 2025, and I had to make hard calls, including letting good people go and right-sizing everything to reality. I also spent a stretch of that time looking hard at whether my future was even in the translation business. The answer I kept arriving at was that the part I couldn't walk away from, the building itself. So I built, again.

AI wasn't new to me. We had been running AI-assisted translation workflows in live production years before ChatGPT was a household name. The experimenting began when I pointed those capabilities at our own friction points, and then I went all in. My first attempt at building an AI agent was impressive on the surface and incredibly frustrating underneath, and the deeper I dug to make it behave, the more I learned about what makes these systems tick. I moved on to building an automated month-end financial review, then an autonomous sales agent, then a content pipeline, each one replacing cost or hours with a system that goes live and stays running.

Somewhere in there, a feeling came back that I first had walking into a computer science degree in the 90s: intellectually stimulating, full of variety, with a real purpose behind the outcome. When the clock on the wall disappears, I know I've found my place.

The rebuild worked. The business came back to profitability, leaner and more intentional than before. And the way it came back, systems first, AI as the multiplier, is exactly what I now help other business owners do.

With, not for

If chaos into harmony is what I do, "with, not for" is how I do it. It runs through every part of my life.

As a dad: don't take your kids to soccer, play soccer with them. Don't send them to camp, go camping with them. My boys and I are more like good friends than father and sons, and I credit every chairlift conversation, every bike race pit, every road trip for that. My youngest once told me, "Dad, you were there for everything, like everything." Kids watch you closely, always. Being with them is what they remember.

On the hill: I volunteer as an adaptive ski instructor with Track3, working alongside skiers with diverse disabilities. One of my students carried real anxiety about riding the chairlift, the kind that can end a ski day before it starts. We worked through it together, and partway up the mountain he reframed the whole experience himself: "It's like flying in an airplane, except the view is better because there aren't those tiny windows!" Chaos into harmony, in one sentence, on one chairlift. He found it himself; I was simply alongside to help steer the ride.

The CADS Snow Valley year-end video.

With clients: sometimes you arrive with a clear vision, and sometimes my job is opening up perspectives so you can see opportunities you couldn't see before. Either way, you bring the knowledge of your business, the solution takes shape together, and I take the friction off your shoulders, carrying it through to a system that works. The result is something you understand and believe in, because you helped create it. People support a world they help create. I've never found an exception.