the Business Doc: About this Blog

Greetings. Here at this site I introduce new ways for you to:

Stimulate your company's organic growth
Streamline your organization's operations
Apply innovative techniques to supercharge your bottom line
Read about unusual and oft-overlooked companies and methods

I share road-tested techniques and cite real-world case studies from my time at Sterling Group, a consulting practice I co-founded that taught CEOs of small businesses and Fortune 500 corporations to ignite profitability.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

In my early 20s, I served in Army Special Operations. Trained as an interrogator, I developed strategic operating plans in psychological warfare. I learned that in military operations the most fearsome enemy is conquerable by an unorthodox strategy.

As a civilian, I have worked as an employee, CEO, consultant, and money manager.

As an employee, I developed a reputation as a corporate troubleshooter.
As a consultant, I developed strategies for business leadership to surmount challenging issues.
As a CEO, I implemented and tested my wild-ass theories within my own organization.

While advising other CEOs, I had a birds-eye view into the function and dysfunction of many companies. I gained intimate understanding of what distinguishes a successful firm from a sub-par one. This experience furnished me a valuable analytical toolkit that enabled me to accrue an enviable track record as a fund manager and investor.

I've run some projects well and others into the ground. These posts are the fruits of my experience. The tips I share born from my failures are at least as valuable as those from my successes. I hope that my taking the more difficult path will allow you as my reader to sidestep the obstacles.

EARLY BACKGROUND

I was a consummate geek. Born in 1963 and raised during the computer technology infancy, I became infatuated with technology at a young age. My father sat me down in his office and allowed me to play blackjack against the computer. From then on, I was certain I knew what I wanted to be doing with my life: computers. I absorbed everything I could - in those days the only books were mainly post-graduate texts on engineering disciplines, and it was all over my head. My mother moved us to Colorado for junior high and I spent every evening coding assembly into my home-built Z-80 microprocessor using a hex keypad.

I attended a boarding school on the East Coast and when I returned home for the summers, a group of like-minded delinquents broke into university offices to hack the mainframe and feed our digital obsessions in the late evenings and into the morning. We did many things that would get us locked up today, but in the early 80's hacking was considered more a prank than a felony.

After serving in Army Special Operations, I returned to civilian life. I grew sales and marketing departments for two tech firms and a direct marketing company later sold to Experian.

MY CURRENT PASSION: TRADING STRATEGY

Investing has fascinated me since I was a teenager but while attending grad school, I started running money for others and discovered a passion for trading options. After grad school, I won an internship at a hedge fund. Later I opened my own firm and managed an alternative fund that more than tripled the market return five years in a row. I later worked for a large Wall Street firm.

Having grown start-ups and held senior executive positions for large corporations like Sprint and Merrill Lynch, I much prefer start-ups. I revel in helping entrepreneurs build world-class teams to execute innovative marketing strategy using technology as an enabler. Profitably disrupting markets while bettering the world fuels my ardor for fast-growth ventures.

I am currently finishing up "AutoPilot Investing" due to be published in Fall 2015 that makes investing accessible to everybody.

I'm a sweat equity angel investor. I'm available for project consulting and occasionally make public speaking appearances for business and financial topics. Write me at Email address