I grew up thinking I was going to be an artist. I didn’t know anyone who could tell me what that actually looked like as a way to make a living, so in the fall of 1994 I panicked and enrolled in electrical engineering instead. My dad was a master electrician in the coal mines, and I think some part of me was trying to find a version of “artist” that would still make sense to him — something with a clear name, a clear path, a clear job title. Electrical engineering had all of that. It just wasn’t actually me.
I ended up in tech instead, almost by accident, and spent the next several years doing IT in four very different shapes. I started in support. Then I ran a check-processing department — high-speed scanners capturing check images and backing them up to a database, turning something physical and messy into something structured enough to actually rely on. After that, I worked as a network systems technician for an IT consulting firm, where the job changed depending on what the client actually needed — sometimes a quick fix, sometimes a full rebuild of how their network operated. From 2001 to 2008, I was Director of IT for the National MS Society, Mid-Atlantic Chapter, running their network and serving as their local database administrator. At one point I was CCNA and MCSE certified.
The MS Society job is where something started happening, though I didn’t have a name for it at the time. I had an unusual amount of freedom there — I wasn’t boxed into a single narrow function, so I’d end up with a hand in fundraising campaigns, email outreach systems, and the technical infrastructure underneath all of it. Nobody had asked me to connect those things. I just couldn’t help noticing that they were never really separate problems. A clunky donation process wasn’t just an IT annoyance — it was actively costing the organization money and goodwill. A disorganized email system wasn’t just a marketing inconvenience — it was a structural failure that happened to show up as a bad email.
When I started what was then called Phoenixfire Solutions, I tried to build the business around that exact realization. The plan was to help nonprofits with everything — design, marketing, IT infrastructure, databases, fundraising — because I’d already seen, firsthand, that those things were never actually separate. It didn’t land. The clearest moment of that came with a client we were helping on a branding and collateral project for their 25th anniversary. I was onsite the day their server went down. They called someone else to fix it. It never occurred to them to ask me — even knowing my background, even with me standing right there.
It wasn't that they didn't trust me with it. The category just didn't exist in their head.
I was the brochure person. Someone else was the server person. The thought of those being the same kind of problem, solved by the same kind of person, wasn’t something they’d ever had a reason to consider.
That was the pattern, over and over: people were looking for X when what they actually needed was Y, and a pitch that tried to offer both at once just didn’t compute. So by 2011, we stopped saying it out loud. We narrowed down to more traditional design work, for businesses in general rather than just nonprofits, because that was a story the market already knew how to hear.
That was the status quo for years. Around 2015, the pattern started showing up again, impossible to ignore. Clients would ask us for marketing collateral when what they actually needed was a better process. We’d dig into one part of their marketing and discover they were quietly overpaying somewhere else because of a broken internal workflow nobody had looked at. We started doing more workshops and facilitation work to address it directly — but we still didn’t have real language for what connected all of it. It just felt squishy. Ambiguous. Like we were trying to do everything because we couldn’t explain the one thing we were actually doing.
The High-Velocity Design Model™(HVDM) is the first time I’ve had language precise enough to say the true thing out loud. It’s only a few months old — it came out of me trying to explain, in a presentation, why design work still needs a human in the loop to stay authentic even as AI takes over more of the production work. But the thinking underneath it isn’t new. It’s the same pattern I first noticed at the MS Society more than twenty years ago, the same pattern that made a client call someone else to fix a server while I stood a few feet away, the same pattern that pulled us toward workshops in 2015. We were doing the work for years, it just took us this long to find the words that made people truly listen.
Brand Systems Engineering isn't a rebrand. It's the fourth attempt at saying something I've believed since I was running a nonprofit's email system and noticed it was never really about the email.
I’m not telling you this story because it makes a clean pitch. It doesn’t, particularly – there’s a version of this where I sound like I had a plan the whole time, and that version would be a lie. The actual truth is that I’ve spent most of my career circling the same insight, getting partway there, watching people not quite understand it because I hadn’t yet found the words to make it click, and narrowing back down to something sayable.
Curious what this looks like applied to your business? Start with the Friction Audit.
