Why I'm Going Back to School to Study the Thing I've Spent My Career Doing

This August, I'm starting a Doctor of Business Administration at Texas State University. After fifteen-plus years of building and running organizations, I'm going back to school. Not to step away from the work, but to get better at it.

Here's the honest version of why.

For most of my career, I've been an operator. The person responsible for making sure the vision actually happens, that the systems hold, the teams coordinate, and growth doesn't quietly break the thing it's supposed to be building. I learned this first in the nonprofit world, eventually as Chief Operating Officer at a national cancer organization, where I figured out fast that passion doesn't scale on its own. Sustainable impact comes from infrastructure: fundraising systems, customer service, digital commerce, the unglamorous machinery underneath the mission.

One project stuck with me more than the rest. I built an ecommerce operation inside that nonprofit and grew it from $5K to $275K a year. What started as a merch experiment turned into a real system with supply chains, automation, and a full customer experience. It worked. It made money. And then leadership transitioned, and it couldn't sustain itself. The whole thing had been quietly built around a single operator, and when that operator left, the system went with him.

That stayed with me. Because I've now watched the same pattern play out across every kind of organization I've worked in.

Today I'm CEO of Firmspace, a premium private-office company with locations in Austin, Denver, Houston, and Atlanta, where I oversee strategy, real estate development, operations, and technology. Different industry, same lesson on repeat: organizations almost always grow faster than their operational maturity. Success shows up on the outside while fragility builds underneath. The business looks like it's thriving right up until the moment it depends too heavily on one person, one process living in someone's head, one undocumented system that no one else can run.

That's the problem I want to study formally. The DBA gives me a way to do it.

I'm drawn to applied research: organizational systems, technology-enabled operations, leadership transition risk, and what I'd call durable scale. Specifically, I want to understand how the systems operators design, things like automation, digital infrastructure, and real process documentation, can make founder-led and executive-dependent organizations more resilient. How do you build something that outlives the person who built it? That's the question I keep coming back to, and it's one I've earned the hard way rather than read about.

Texas State's program fits how I already think. It's built for practitioner-researchers, people doing real work on real organizational problems, not theory for its own sake. I get to stay professionally active while doing research grounded in actual experience, which is the only kind of research I'm interested in producing.

My goal isn't to disappear into academic journals. I want to translate what I learn into formats that operators and executives can actually use: frameworks, writing, executive education, advisory work. The gap between academic insight and operational reality is exactly the gap I've lived in my whole career. I'd like to spend the next chapter helping close it.

So this isn't a pivot away from practice. It's a commitment to strengthening it.

I'm not promising a running journal of the experience. But something this immersive doesn't stay in a classroom. It changes the questions you ask and the way you see your own work, so it will undoubtedly skew what I write and build from here. If you're wrestling with the same questions about scale, sustainability, and the limits of organizations built around singular people, that shift is probably worth watching.