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 I have run

The largest operation I have led was a university dining program: about $6.5 million a year, 120 employees, four salaried managers, and roughly 3,000 meals a day. Before that I directed ten retail outlets on another campus, ran its catering department, and managed catering at a third university where a peak week meant more than 120 events and a year meant more than 3,400.

In 2018 I moved to a smaller account: a seven-figure private corporate dining operation where I am accountable for the food, the team, the finances, compliance, and the client. I took it over with the client relationship in trouble and the account at risk of being lost. It was not lost. Since then I have secured the team the largest pay raise in the account's history, shut the operation down and restarted it through COVID, and most recently delivered about $100,000 a year in net savings for the client.

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.