My passion for ‘business’, cliche but true, started with my earliest childhood memories of going to my father’s small insurance office every day, and it has grown into a lifelong obsession.

I officially began my business journey at Oglethorpe University, where I was awarded a full ride academic scholarship, and graduated cum laude with a B.A. in Economics. While in school there I also interned for the highest grossing, luxury real estate team in Atlanta, and the largest private client group financial advisory team. After graduating, I began my full-time career with Millennium Consulting, as a Consultant for their Business Advisory Division, and during my 6-year career there I worked on a wide variety of engagements, for hundreds of clients of all sizes, across the country, as well as presented as Millennium’s spokesman at over a dozen industry conferences. I specialized in new product and service rollouts, optimizing market positioning and streamlining expansion strategies. While working at Millennium, I also earned my M.S. in Business Economics cum laude, from the J. Mack Robinson College of Business, at Georgia State University.

During my final year at Millennium, 2019, I saw a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to launch my own startup in the virtual, mental healthcare space, and although mental healthcare was certainly not my specialty, I was able to use my business expertise to build out a company that could capitalize on it. GroupItOut was a small startup based out of Atlanta, with 3 psychologists, and 5 direct employees, including myself; that provided anonymous, virtual group therapy, to employees of large companies. I stepped out of my consulting role at Millennium to officially launch GroupItOut in January of 2020, and just 2 months later as pandemic lockdowns hit, the space exploded. The unprecedented spike in mental health concerns and the need for virtual options led to a rapidly scaling, winner-take-all market, with several of GroupItOut’s primary competitors, like BetterHelp and later UpLift, still operating as national players today. Although GroupItOut was unfortunately not prepared to scale at the level required to benefit from the lockdowns, I was able to pivot the company’s focus to the acquisition of clients with broad name recognition, and leverage one key name, Spanx. Spanx ™ was GroupItOut’s first client, with Sara Blakely’s name behind it as the only self-made female billionaire in the world, and that opened the door for others like NCR, Southern Company, and WellStar, as well as about a dozen non-household names.

With a modest exit package from a competitor in late 2021, I left GroupItOut in search of my next business adventure. Starting and running my own business in a new space really piqued my interest beyond what corporate consulting could offer, and I really wanted to take on a broader range of clients and business challenges. I’d always had the idea I would semi-retire one day and teach at the collegiate level while consulting on my own, and while my earnings to date didn’t exactly allow for retirement yet, I did come across a unique opportunity to move in that direction. As a Business Economics Specialist in North Carolina, I was able to help a myriad of small, local businesses that wouldn’t have otherwise had access to consulting solutions, and coordinate with mid-to-large employers in the state to develop community college curriculum, specifically designed to provide those employers with workforce-ready graduates.

That role confirmed I was on the right path, so I began working with my own consulting clients on the side, and teaching online as an Adjunct Professor at Erskine College, in the Fall of 2024, with the aim of eventually creating what is now GraniteBridge. A short 18 months later, I moved to Erskine College as an Associate Professor of Business and Economics, and I was able to officially launch my own firm, GraniteBridge Inc..