01Where it starts
Business and entrepreneurship were part of everyday life from the beginning.
My family built and operated medical practices across northern Michigan for several decades: a medical center, and later a group of clinics that grew into a multi-location business across the region. In my teens I also spent time inside a very different kind of organization, a small nonprofit.
That gave me an early view into the decisions behind a business: why patients chose one practice over another, what made good people want to stay, where time and money were being lost, which investments paid off, and how to plan around different revenue models and seasonal fluctuations.
What stayed with me was how differently each organization had to be managed, even in the same community. The business model changed the priorities, the metrics and the decisions.
That perspective still shapes how I approach companies today: understand what makes the business successful before deciding what should change.
02Learning the levers
Next, I moved to Dallas and studied finance at SMU, specializing in alternative asset management.
Finance gave me a more disciplined way to evaluate a business: how it creates value, where capital is producing a return, what drives margins, where risk sits and which variables have the greatest effect on performance.
While at SMU, I also spent time in wealth management and private equity. They were very different environments, but both reinforced the same lesson: good decisions depend on understanding what is actually driving the numbers.
That became increasingly important as I moved toward business intelligence and technology.
A faster process, a better dashboard or a new piece of software only matters if it gives leaders better answers, saves the team time or improves performance.
03Inside a growing company
Then I had the chance to build inside a company that was changing quickly.
I joined a private-equity-backed medical aesthetics company as it expanded to 27 locations across multiple states.
The company had plenty of information, but getting useful answers from it was harder than it should have been. Reporting still depended heavily on spreadsheets and manual processes. Data lived across clinical, financial, marketing and operating systems. We had integration resources, but even relatively small changes could require an outside team and a long turnaround.
I built the business intelligence function from the ground up.
That included connecting clinical, marketing, operating and financial information; automating reporting around the company’s core KPIs; building workflows across departments; creating customized executive dashboards; and eventually developing an internal AI system that could work with the company’s own data, protocols and operating information.
The most satisfying part was seeing what happened afterward.
Leadership could get answers without waiting for someone to rebuild a spreadsheet. Teams spent less time on repetitive tasks. Managers could see problems sooner. Questions that once took hours or days could be answered in minutes.
That is where the value became obvious to me.
04What I learned to look for
The first problem you see is not always the one you need to solve.
A department might ask for a new report when the real issue is that two systems calculate the same metric differently. A team might want new software when the existing system already has the capability they need. A manual process might look like an automation problem when one change in workflow would eliminate it altogether.
Over time, I learned to start by asking better questions.
Where is someone repeatedly rebuilding the same answer? Where are people working around a system instead of using it? Where does leadership lack visibility? What takes too long? What creates errors? What is preventing the business from growing as efficiently as it could?
That is the experience I bring from one business to the next. Finding those problems and seeing what changes when they are fixed is also the part of the work I enjoy most.
05Why Peridive
Most businesses already have capable systems, well-established manual routines, or both.
QuickBooks, EMR or scheduling platforms, CRM systems, Google Business Profile, marketing tools, payment systems and Google Sheets all hold useful pieces of the business. Other processes may have been handled the same way for years because the routine works well enough.
Peridive looks at both.
Sometimes the opportunity is connecting systems. Sometimes it is automating a manual process. Sometimes it is getting substantially more from tools the company already pays for.
Other times, there is a larger opportunity to use AI or build something specific to the company.
And sometimes the best answer is simply to change the process.
Peridive starts by understanding the problem, then uses the simplest approach that will solve it well.
“The way you’ve always done it probably made sense when you started it. My job is to spot when a better way has quietly become available.”
06How I work
The goal is a business that is simpler to manage, performs better and gives leadership more time for strategy — or simply more time back.
The report is ready before the meeting. The numbers reconcile. A repetitive task no longer takes someone two hours every Friday. Managers can answer their own questions. Existing systems do more of what the company already pays them to do.
I like to work closely with the people who know the business best, spend time understanding how the company actually operates and stay involved as needs change.
Some clients come with one specific problem. Others want an ongoing relationship with someone who already understands the business and can keep improving it as new needs and capabilities emerge.
Either way, the starting point is the same: understand the business first.