I grew up in Indiana between a small city and a farm. My parents and most relatives were blue-collar workers; farmers, miners, and valued hard work. My father a college graduate was the exception as businessman most days he wore a coat and tie. He was a negotiator and collaborator and taught me his trade.

In high school, I started on one of the top golf teams in the state all four years and received concurrent varsity letters. As a senior, I was recognized for the Sportsman of the year based on sportsmanship and character. My performance as a junior golfer earned me a college scholarship at Indiana State University. There I earned four concurrent varsity letters. While in college I attained a Bachelor of Arts degree in Safety & Environmental management. Most of my 42 years of working in the corporate world have been devoted to the electric and gas utility industry. This has been a rewarding experience earning consistent escalations in growth and responsibility to where I just completed my work as a Chief Operating Officer. These opportunities have occurred with leading investors, and municipally run utilities both domestically and internationally. I have worked directly in 30 countries around the world and have a deep respect for diverse cultures. Although my work has progressed leading extremely large operational areas I am anchored by safety, labor relations, and security.

Most notably, I have the ability to take difficult problems evaluate their tendencies, and improve performance in a reasonable period of time. I have not experienced a work-related fatality under my direction and control since 2003. In 2014 I was responsible for contractor crews on Duke Energy property in Cincinnati Ohio and sustained no OSHA recordable injuries. Most of this work was performed off-road on hills and on farm property. In 2019 at CPS Energy,  we achieved the EHS award for attaining the best safety performance among the top 200 health and safety programs in the U.S.
My work also included working for nearly 4 years working with one of the leading utilities in the world based in Rome Italy. It was here that we developed a system referred to as “Safety 24-7”. This process was based on a study of 5 years of data compiled into 5 categories of contributing behavior. A unique process was developed to extract actually injury scenarios from the study about 30 for each category. For each injury, we depicted the prohibited behavior with a photo outlined in red, the danger to avoid the injury was outlined in yellow, and finally, the acceptable behavior was outlined in green all built around the stoplight. Green=proceed, Yellow=caution, Red=stop. We developed training. books in multiple languages and trained all 43,000 employees. The results were tremendous the firm saw in most countries a -25% in injuries. Moreover, the firm was recognized for the DuPont Safety Award.