The short version of a long story.

I'm a mechanical engineer by degree and a builder by compulsion. The pattern of my career is pretty consistent: I find a problem I can't stop thinking about, take it on whether or not I'm qualified yet, and figure it out by doing it. That's how I ended up designing bioreactors that turn grocery store food waste into fertilizer, running a machine shop team at 24, co-founding a kombucha company, and spending six years building campers for a truck that barely existed when I started.

Along the way I deliberately collected the skills that usually live in separate people. I can design a mold in SolidWorks, program the CNC that cuts it, pull the composite part, and do the bodywork that makes it look like it came from a factory. I can wire the 3-phase panel that runs the machine and build the financial model that explains why we bought it. That range is the whole point of Exactlee: you get one person who understands the entire path from idea to delivered product, because I've walked it — more than once, in more than one industry.

I learned the craft side from Andries Breedt, a master toolmaker I worked under early on. His philosophy stuck with me: real mastery comes from sustained contact with materials, not from instruction. It's why I distrust designs from people who have never had to make the thing they drew.

I'll be honest about the record, too. Space Campers — my most ambitious project — built a product that twenty customers love, and still didn't survive as a business. The manufacturing economics failed even though the engineering succeeded, and the lessons from that are now part of what clients get from me. If your plan has a weak point, I've probably paid tuition on it already. I'd rather you didn't have to.

These days I run Exactlee out of my shop in San Luis Obispo and advise startups through the SLO Small Business Development Center, which mostly means helping students and first-time founders avoid expensive mistakes. When I'm not working I'm surfing, fixing up an old van, or finishing the warehouse I converted into a home — because apparently I don't stop building when I go home, either.

The projects tell the rest of the story →