John R.

I spent 16 years at Brother International in senior operational leadership, with full P&L responsibility across B2B wholesale, direct-to-consumer, channel management, and large-scale partner execution. Then I founded HomeExcept, an award-winning technology start-up. I built the team, raised the investment, and took it toward product-market fit. I ran operations before I built systems for them. That's the lens I bring to every engagement. Most clients who hire me don't have a technology problem. They have an execution problem. The work lives in spreadsheets, inboxes, a CRM nobody trusts, and one person's head. Teams spend more time coordinating work than doing it. RECENT WORK - Hotel and student-housing operator: middleware between StarRez and HubSpot after a silently expired integration left 20,000+ contacts unsynced, plus leasing workbenches and pace reporting. Then an HR platform with automated onboarding, background checks, certification expiry alerts, and AI search across years of SharePoint records. - Behavioral health provider: fractional COO. EHR configuration and testing, billing and claims, referral intake, and a business rules register and data dictionary that tie policy, workflow, and data together. - Family investment office: fractional CTO. Infrastructure discovery and a build-vs-configure review that led to a recommendation to retire a custom data reconciliation pipeline. - Language-training company: a custom CRM sitting between marketing and delivery, replacing spreadsheet, form, and email handoffs. Shipped in small, iterative releases. - Tour operator: playbooks, KPIs, and dashboards for three core processes. When leadership found the playbooks too long for daily use, we rebuilt them as a rules-first knowledge base. - Employment law firm: an AI client-intake pilot with conflict screening and Outlook scheduling, scoped small to prove value before a larger roadmap. HOW I WORK I start with discovery: how the work actually moves today, who owns each step, and where it breaks. I recommend incremental change before replacement, and I document as I build — decision logs, business rules, data dictionaries — so your team can run the system without me. ORGANIZATIONS BRING ME IN WHEN - Teams are buried in manual coordination - Work falls through the cracks between departments - Two systems disagree and someone reconciles them by hand - Leadership can't see what's happening without asking someone - Growth has outrun systems built for a smaller company - AI initiatives have stalled at the pilot stage - Critical processes depend on one or two people WHAT I BUILD - Workflow mapping, redesign, and operational playbooks - CRM and system integrations (HubSpot, StarRez, Microsoft 365) - Custom operator workbenches and internal tools - AI-enabled workflows with human-in-the-loop review - Document governance and AI search over existing records - Operational dashboards and reporting leadership actually uses PLATFORMS AI: Claude, OpenAI, Gemini, AI agents, RAG Microsoft: Microsoft 365, SharePoint, Entra ID, Microsoft Graph, Fabric CRM & Ops: HubSpot, Salesforce, ClickUp, Monday, Airtable, Asana, Jira, Notion Build: Lovable, React/Next js, TypeScript, Node js, PostgreSQL, Supabase, REST APIs Automation: Zapier, Make, n8n ENGAGEMENTS Discovery & Operational Assessments Fixed-Scope Implementations AI & Automation Pilots Fractional COO / CTO Embedded Delivery Partnerships