q & a
where did you grow up?
I spent much of my childhood in Detroit Lakes, MN. My family moved to Fargo, ND when I was a freshman in high school. I attended Shanley High School where I graduated with honors in 2002.
where did you go to college?
I went to North Dakota State University in Fargo, ND. I double majored in business administration and economics as well as double minoring in philosophy and visual art. I graduated cum laude in the spring of 2007.
what kind of jobs have you had?
I started working (under the table) bussing tables when I was 13. I spent the next 10 years working in restaurants. I worked in a wide array of restaurants starting at local diners and popular chains and ending at a highly regarded and trendy fine dinning establishment. I have also done a host of miscellaneous things to pay my way such as gardening, painting, computer repair, web development and technology consulting. After college I started at IBM and have worked there ever since.
what are your hobbies?
I have a wide variety of hobbies. I like keeping physically fit by running, lifting weights, wakeboarding and snowboarding. I follow the financial markets and keep track of emerging technology trends daily. I enjoy going out for dinner and drinks with friends, family and business acquaintances. Recently I have started Spanish lessons and look forward to advancing my knowledge of the subject. Besides these, I enjoy traveling, fashion, cooking, learning, teaching, films, culture and politics.
do you have a family?
I have no family of my own yet, although some day I am very much looking forward to it. My extended family lives around northern Minnesota and North Dakota. I have been dating Jenn, a very wonderful woman for nearly two years. Her family is located around the Minneapolis / St. Paul area and northern Minnesota.
where do you live?
I live in a nice apartment in Rochester, MN near IBM's campus.
career goals
When I was in the IBM COE (Center of Excellence) we stressed standardization and optimization. The business is constantly expanding and more work is coming to our department. Often, the contracts are signed so quickly that there is not time to train and assign a new Financial Analyst. Our manager chooses the more senior analysts to take on the job. We constantly reinvent streamlined processes.
My first desk rotation was as a Contract Financial Analyst. I immediately stepped up to the plate and started to find areas that were the same month over month. I made comprehensive lists of different indicators that guided my manual coding. After a few closes, my list was complete and I immediately began constructing a standardized close package. My work cut 10 hours off the first month and 16 off the subsequent months after some refinements. Soon after, I was given all of the work of my colleague and had absorbed the work of a full time person with incremental stress and large savings to the company. Similar work was done on a labor claiming process. I designed a process to capture labor hours and charges across multiple contacts with very little work. The time savings for me and colleagues has been immense. Our reports (or managers) have really enjoyed the standard reports. There is no more hunting for cell references or questioning data accuracy.
I took my next role and immediately started to find process improvements and opportunities to standardize the process created by the previous analyst. I developed new and innovative queries to capture all of the financials month over month. Also, I made education packets to be used by our team to help improve financial integrity and drive accuracy.
I have driven standardization across my entire department for my current role. I worked with our director to build and implement a brand new forecast loading template. Also, I made a process that analyzes new departments with ease. My labor reporting skills increased dramatically. I wrote Visual Basic code to retrieve actuals from one program, input them into a completely different one, perform basic analysis and consolidation and then email my support groups the result. This took 10 hours off my desk and turned it into a click of a button.
Currently, I am in charge of tracking recruitment and hiring expenses across our entire country. My largest task has been developing cost recovery models for every geography and means of distributing our expenses to hundreds of business units in order to come to a breakeven position at year end. I have taken on increasing magnitudes of responsibility and initiated several needed process changes.
I look forward to developing my career and very much enjoy my work.
Thank you for reading and feel free to contact me if you have any questions.