A brief history of me.

I was born and raised in Los Angeles, CA. As the mecca of entertainment and consumerism, I was immersed and fascinated in the art of persuasion. My mother would call for me across aisles in the supermarket. I would pretend not to hear her, wandering through the store, examining every product. I was a latch key kid with TV as my babysitter and two German Shepherds by my side, watching the Brady Bunch and the Jeffersons.. It was the best of the times and the worst of times. Easy living, but bored. I knew there had to be more out there. So I sent myself to school across the country at Rutgers University, where I played collegiate ice hockey for three years until I tore my ACL. I graduated with a degree in Anthropology. Naturally, I sought to go to explore the world and ended up in Africa.

I landed in Zimbabwe where I settled on volunteering for an NGO.. Then came more orthopedic issues. I found out that I had hip dysplasia. So I went back to California and settled in San Francisco, There I had both my hips reconstructed. After a year in bed, I pursued a career in medicine. I completed all of my pre-med studies and did quite well, all the while working in the field of psychiatry.

Those were tough years. I worked within a psychiatric lock-up facility with kids that were often confrontational and violent. I also worked at UCSF, Department of Psychiatry, Division of Addiction Medicine where I recruited streetwise drug users and managed research studies on crack and speed addiction, testing out different drugs to determine if they would reduce cravings. After several exhausting years, I decided that psychiatry wasn’t for me.

My soul search took me back to my early love of brands and design. While in San Francisco, I attended design school. After one semester, I took an internship at Interbrand, which quickly turned in to a full-time job. I was fortunate to work with the best in the world of corporate identity design, during the dot com era. From there, my path was clear. Design was in my heart.

I met my wife Talia online, in 1997, back when catfishing wasn’t even a thing and I had to rely on my 14.4 modem to connect with my love. The birth of our first child coincided with the dot com bust and 9/11/2001. We decided to leave the expensive land of San Francisco and relocate closer to my wife’s family in Chicago.

There we had two more daughters while I tried my hand in advertising, package design, digital, annual reports, etc. After a couple of years I attended the Institute of Design and received my masters degree in design strategy.

With all of that experience under my belt, I decided to try my hand at building a brand in a large corporation. Medline was a diamond in the rough at the time. It was a family-owned healthcare product manufacturer and distributor with $8B in revenues, 25 product divisions and a national distribution network and no brand to speak of. It was a highly decentralized company that had not really embraced the concept of “brand value”. But the Mill’s family that owned the company trusted and supported my vision. Not only was I to build the brand according to design and marketing operations best practice, I had to educate the marketing staff and all of the corporate entities to understand the value and leverage the methodologies.

We built a great department and I hired great people. I learned so much from my colleagues and the people I hired. I couldn’t have done it alone.

After 10 years of passionate drive, Medline had reached about $23B, we had built strategy teams, an integrated marketing function and so much more.

Today, I am moving forward, with great pride in my experience and accomplishments and ready for the next big worklife challenge.