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, becoming a partner in a kombucha company, and spending six years building campers for a truck that barely existed when I started.
Small companies don't have a specialist for every problem, so I learned a lot of jobs that usually belong to different people. On the Space Campers molds I ended up doing all of it myself, mostly because there was nobody else to hand it to. I modeled the mold, programmed the CNC that cut it, pulled the part, and did the bodywork so it didn't look like a garage project. I also wired the 3-phase panel that ran the machine and built the financial model that explained why we bought it. That range is the point of Exactlee. One person who has seen the whole path from idea to delivered product.
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 try not to draw anything I couldn't walk out and make myself.
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.
Lately I've spent months getting hands-on with the current wave of AI tools, learning what they can actually do and where they still fall short. I've started folding the useful ones into how I design, prototype, and run a business, so I can move a lot faster without cutting corners on quality.
When I'm not working, you might find me on a board somewhere, camping out of my old project van, or tending to whatever other project has my attention at the time.
