John R.

I spent 16 years at Brother International in senior operational leadership, with full P&L responsibility across B2B wholesale, direct-to-consumer, channel management, and large-scale partner execution. Then I founded HomeExcept, an award-winning technology start-up. I built the team, raised the investment, and took it toward product-market fit.

I ran operations before I built systems for them. That's the lens I bring to every engagement.

Most clients who hire me don't have a technology problem. They have an execution problem. The work lives in spreadsheets, inboxes, a CRM nobody trusts, and one person's head. Teams spend more time coordinating work than doing it.

RECENT WORK

• Hotel and student-housing operator: middleware between StarRez and HubSpot after a silently expired integration left 20,000+ contacts unsynced, plus leasing workbenches and pace reporting. Then an HR platform with automated onboarding, background checks, certification expiry alerts, and AI search across years of SharePoint records.

• Behavioral health provider: fractional COO. EHR configuration and testing, billing and claims, referral intake, and a business rules register and data dictionary that tie policy, workflow, and data together.

• Family investment office: fractional CTO. Infrastructure discovery and a build-vs-configure review that led to a recommendation to retire a custom data reconciliation pipeline.

• Language-training company: a custom CRM sitting between marketing and delivery, replacing spreadsheet, form, and email handoffs. Shipped in small, iterative releases.

• Tour operator: playbooks, KPIs, and dashboards for three core processes. When leadership found the playbooks too long for daily use, we rebuilt them as a rules-first knowledge base.

• Employment law firm: an AI client-intake pilot with conflict screening and Outlook scheduling, scoped small to prove value before a larger roadmap.

HOW I WORK

I start with discovery: how the work actually moves today, who owns each step, and where it breaks. I recommend incremental change before replacement, and I document as I build — decision logs, business rules, data dictionaries — so your team can run the system without me.

ORGANIZATIONS BRING ME IN WHEN