Operations

From the floor up

I started in restaurants at eighteen, delivering Italian food and pizzas to hospital catering accounts during the day and hungry customers at night. When someone called out one evening, I was moved onto the floor. That turned into years of serving and bartending, first at the same neighborhood restaurant and later while working my way through Florida State University.

During my junior year, I joined a campus contract food service operation in catering. I had no idea at the time that contract dining would become the through-line of my career. From there, I moved through university catering, campus food service leadership, and eventually general management. In 2018, I shifted into corporate dining, where I now lead a café and dining operation serving employees at a corporate site.

What the work taught me

My career has crossed front and back of house, catering, campus dining, and corporate food service. I do not come from formal culinary training, but more than two decades in the industry have given me a strong practical understanding of kitchen operations, menu development, food safety, purchasing, labor, financial performance, contracts, and client relationships.

That range matters because hospitality is never just one thing. The guest experience, kitchen capacity, staffing plan, cost structure, compliance requirements, and client expectations all affect one another. My role has been to understand those relationships, make sound decisions in real time, and keep the operation moving when conditions are less than ideal.

Those lessons transfer well beyond hospitality. They shape how I run Fuzzy Petioles, develop AfterShow, organize the Tropical Plant Expo, and approach institutional work: understand what people actually need, make sound decisions under pressure, and build systems people can actually use.