Operations & Facilities
Bringing a shop, a crew, or a building system back into working order is its own kind of design problem — the process just happens to be a factory instead of an object. Over the past 15 years I've stepped into fabrication shops, art-handling operations, and full facilities in various states of disrepair and rebuilt them into functioning, self-sufficient teams and systems.
That work has taken me from restarting dormant CNC and laser equipment, to rebuilding entire building systems (fire suppression, electrical, plumbing) and bringing them through FDNY and DEP recertification, to auditing vendor contracts closely enough to catch outright billing fraud and fix it. I've hired and trained crews from the ground up, and I've built the systems — pricing structures, cut-sheet estimators, tested packaging products — that let a shop keep running well after I've moved on.
A few examples:
Yellow Factory USA (2025): Directed the ground-up renovation of a custom cabinetry factory — full building system reinstallation, equipment acquisition and commissioning (CNC, water-based paint line, finishing equipment), crew hiring across every department, and fleet restoration — leaving the facility fully renovated and operational within the year.
Volume Industries (2023–2024): As Facilities Manager, audited service records after noticing repeat equipment failures, discovered a maintenance vendor was billing for work it hadn't done, reversed the invoices, and switched providers — resolving a problem that had been quietly draining the budget for months.
SFDS (2019–2022): Managed logistics for traveling installations in Chicago, Miami, and Los Angeles, and led fabrication and production for clients including the New Museum, Hermès, Diptyque, and the Macy's Holiday Windows program.
Artech (2011–2018): Rebuilt the pack/crate department's entire process — cross-trained the whole staff to run independently, introduced tiered crate pricing to fit a wider range of client budgets, and partnered with management to build an Excel-based cut-sheet estimator that cut estimating time company-wide. Also developed the sm[Art] Box, a low-cost packing product validated through structured drop testing, which became a customer-requested product line, along with the company's Storefront Marketing Program.
Along the way I've engineered and designed thousands of crates and crate interiors for artists and estates ranging from John Chamberlain and Alexander Calder to George Washington's death mask — work that's shipped and traveled as carefully as it was built.
I'm currently looking for my next role — ideally one that lets me bring this same turnaround and systems-building work to a team on a project or consulting basis, with the flexibility to travel between them.
