The delinquent who fronted a band and won an Emmy

Born and raised in Lake Bluff, Illinois; high school in Lake Forest — hometown of Ordinary People, Mr. T, and John Hughes. I sang and played guitar in a speed-metal band called Brown; the local paper listed our influences as “Robert Plant, Anthrax, and Motown,” which is either nonsense or a manifesto. Somewhere in the same stretch I made a PBS documentary on racism that won a local Emmy — I spent a day at Chicago’s Robert Taylor Homes, a kid from there spent a day with me in Lake Forest, and our dean wouldn’t let us film on campus because he didn’t love the implication. Teenagers contain multitudes.

Then, at twenty-one, my dad died of cancer. I still think about him every day. It was the hardest thing that had ever happened to me up until that point, and it’s also what finally pointed the fire at something that mattered. From about then on, I started actually going somewhere.

The Loyola kid who crashed investment banking at JPMorgan

I studied math and computer science at Loyola Chicago, with minors in physics, philosophy, and German, because I was hedging. Then I did something no one from Loyola had done before. I talked my way into JPMorgan’s M&A analyst training program in New York, a room otherwise stocked with Ivy League pedigrees. The hours were not human. I slept on my office floor more nights than I’ll admit, and most weeks I’d already clocked forty hours by the time the Starbucks downstairs opened on Wednesday morning. I built the models, lived in the spreadsheets, and finished in the top 10% of analysts in the firm. The math kid could count.

The analyst who went west

My computer-science degree turned out to matter sooner than I expected. At the height of the dot-com B2B wave, JPMorgan moved me to San Francisco to advise CEOs on building digital hubs and networks. Then Chase acquired the firm, and I didn’t have the patience to wait out a multi-year integration before doing real work again — too much fire in the belly. So I kept moving: a stint in equity research at Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, and then, after September 11 froze the market, the biggest leap of all.

The 70% pay cut

Here’s the part that doesn’t make a tidy career story. When Dresdner shut its San Francisco office, I took the severance instead of crawling back to New York into a dead job market. I had dated a French girl during my time in SF and decided I’d like to do that again, so I went to where there were a great many of them. I started over in a country where I didn’t yet speak the language. I taught myself French. I took a finance job from a cold start, no network, for about 30% of my old banking pay, covering 15 countries, 10 plants, and $600M in sales out of Paris. The company was Fresenius — one of the largest and most successful healthcare conglomerates in the world that almost no one has heard of, and even fewer can pronounce. By the time I left it was running around $30 billion in revenue with more than 220,000 people. The pay cut gets funnier in hindsight: when I took the job, I couldn’t have told you what the company actually did. The man who hired me, Didier Coyaux, became a true friend and one of the mentors I count most. Lowest salary of my career. Best decision I ever made.

What they did, it turned out, was personal. Fresenius Kabi makes the IV nutrition that keeps critically ill patients alive, and at the time it produced essentially all of the IV lipids used in the world. When I was eighteen, my dad was in a hospital bed, wasted to less than half his body weight by a stem cell transplant for his non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. A nurse pointed to the bag of white fluid running into his arm and told me that this “McDonald’s in a bottle” was the only thing keeping him alive. I’d taken the pay cut and moved to Paris with no idea I’d joined the company that made it. I found that out later.

CFO in post-crisis Argentina

I’d been in France about eighteen months when the next move came at me fast, on a Thursday. My boss’s boss, a Fresenius Kabi board member named Marc Crouton, asked me whether I spoke Spanish. I said no. He said no problem, you’ll pick it up, and handed me a plane ticket to Buenos Aires for Sunday night. Three days away. He told me to leave my apartment keys with his secretary and she’d see that my things followed. Marc was one of several mentors I’ve been lucky to have, and one of the ones who mattered most. So I went. Argentina had just been through a full currency collapse, and I landed as CFO of a family-run company we had acquired right before it hit. My job was to professionalize it: upgrade the systems and processes a growing company needs, acquire our nearest competitor, accelerate growth, and set the business up to last. Chaos, it turns out, is just opportunity nobody has organized yet.

The turnaround GM in Central Europe

Central Europe was Marc’s idea too. Same as Argentina, it happened in days. He had just taken on a new region and needed someone with real finance chops to turn it around, paired with one of his best sales-and-marketing people, Roland Rousseau, who became the second most important mentor of my life. Together we got the Czech and Polish businesses under control and growing profitably again: $135M, two regional controllers, thirty department heads, and an apartment in Prague. Two more turnarounds, two more languages I learned to order a beer in. The bigger lesson wasn’t the turnaround. It was the team. The group Marc built was the first genuinely high-performance team I had ever stood inside. Banking had given me good mentors of its own, especially Randy Lyon and Raj Rathi in Chicago, and Randy in particular showed me what steady leadership looks like. But the work there was mostly individual. What I saw under Marc was different in kind, a whole team firing at a level I hadn’t watched up close before. It changed what I believed was possible, and it set the bar for every team I have built since.

EVP across Northern Europe — at 30

I took over sales and marketing for the UK, Ireland, the Nordics, Canada, and the US, run out of Paris, Manchester, and Stockholm. As far as I know, I was the youngest EVP in the company’s history, and it certainly felt that way. My peers were 45 to 50, and call it impostor syndrome, but I spent a good while feeling like the kid who’d snuck into the room. I also sat on the team that acquired APP Pharmaceuticals, which set up the move that came next.

Running a $1.6B business in the US

The APP deal pulled me back to Chicago to run Fresenius Kabi‘s US sales and marketing — 120+ product families, 90+ people. I grew it from $1.2B to $1.6B, cut backorders from $80M to $20M, added 250 basis points of profit in a capacity-constrained market, and persuaded the FDA to accept an entirely new regulatory paradigm for parenteral nutrition — a genuine rarity in the industry. I also launched The American Nurse, a book and documentary built around the people who are the real front line of infusion therapy and whose voices the industry too often undervalued or never heard. The whole point was to actually listen to nurses and put them at the center. It drew applause all the way to the White House and has since reached more than 100 million people.

After thirteen years and a run most people would stretch into a whole career, the only step up left was a move to Germany or Asia. By then I had a young family, my wife Carla and our daughter, and that wasn’t a trade I was willing to make. So I went looking for what was next.

CEO by 40 — the Metagenics turnaround

Metagenics carried something most companies don’t: a real mission. Its science was shaped by Dr. Jeffrey Bland, the father of functional medicine, and under my watch we helped found and fund his Personalized Lifestyle Medicine Institute. The company set out to do nothing smaller than change how medicine is practiced. By the time I took over it was a ~$200M global business that had grown up as a family company and needed integrating and professionalizing. But I never ran it like a turnaround, and never like something to flip. I ran it like a lifelong hold, with one goal: make it its best self and live up to the revolution it was always meant to be. That meant building: a real leadership team; modern ERP, CRM and BI; a genuine R&D pipeline; an industry-leading education platform, Metagenics Institute; and PLMC, the state-of-the-art Personalized Lifestyle Medicine Center we built from the ground up. We launched in China, Japan, Argentina, Chile, the UK, France, and Italy, certified the whole company as a B Corp, doubled revenue to $400M+, more than quadrupled profit, and ultimately handed it on, set up to last, with an exit to private equity in 2021. I don’t build by cutting. I build.

The side empire that never sleeps — Heraldic

Running alongside everything else, always: real estate. I’ve designed and rebuilt three houses from the studs up and I can’t stop redoing my apartments in Chicago. Heraldic is what happens when a hobby refuses to stay a hobby — multifamily and holdings, and the kind of work where I get to decide things with a tape measure instead of a board deck. It earns the half-number because it never had a start date and shows no sign of an end one.

Founder — Sage

The one we started from a blank page, and in another sense the continuation of everything before it. We spent years at Metagenics trying to move functional medicine from the fringe toward just good medicine, and Sage is, in large part, what we learned there aimed straight at the individual. In 2023 we founded Sage — Derek Moore, Mark Kandyba, and me — on a single idea: wisdom is prevention. Most of what eventually takes us down builds quietly for years while the lab work still reads “normal,” and by the time medicine catches it the easy window has closed. Sage gets there earlier. Painless at-home blood tests, an app that reads your results back to you in plain English, and a line of doctor-formulated SageMD supplements, so anyone can take charge of their own health and add good years instead of just collecting data. The piece functional medicine never fully cracked was compliance. Knowing what to do has never been the hard part; doing it, week after week, is the whole game, and most good advice dies in that gap. Sage is built for exactly that gap: agency and behavior change, the small habits that move the needle and actually stick, not another pile of numbers. Both my partners are technologists, and that’s deliberate: technology and AI are how Sage delivers all of this at scale, doing the interpretation and the steady nudging that used to take a specialist most people can’t get to. It has shown up on NBC, ABC, Fox, and Yahoo Finance. Medicine 3.0, made usable.

CEO again — FoodPharma

In 2024 I took the helm at FoodPharma, a hundred years of confectionery know-how rebuilt as a modern maker of functional bars and soft chews for the best brands in nutrition. Same playbook I have run my whole career. A new leadership team, a rebuilt commercial engine, sales incentives pointed at the right accounts and real margin, and proper systems underneath. We have more than doubled the business and swung it hard toward profit, because strategy is not a deck. It is how your people operate when you are not in the room.