About
Who you'd actually be dealing with
It's just me, from the first call through closing.
Hi. I'm Frankie. Here's the Résumé.
"Do you even know how to write code?" she asked, eyebrows raised, when I told her the plan. Nope. I learned anyway, and in 2010 I started a software company.
There was a time when I didn't know how to operate a nuclear reactor, or speak Brazilian Portuguese, or how to work with PhDs to try and cure cancer. But rarely did I let not knowing something stop me from eventually knowing it. Now my quest is to learn as much as I can about insurance and running an agency.
It's been a long winding road to here. My stretch in the military included six years in the Navy's nuclear program, a reactor operator on the John C. Stennis CVN-74, an aircraft carrier. Think Homer Simpson's job without the glowing rods in your back pocket. They promised me I'd see the world, and it's true, I saw a whole lot of ocean.
Knowing I didn't want to stay in the Navy or nuclear power, I started FBombMedia and helped people take vague ideas and turn them into real mobile applications. I ran teams remotely before it was cool. I helped build mobile applications for names like Ohio State and Chase. I also made payroll, wrote proposals, and did the hiring because someone needed to wear all the hats.
In between there were one-way tickets to places like Thailand and Colombia, a while spent wonderfully lost in Laos, and a stretch staying with the families of contractors I'd hired in India. Fifty-odd countries by the end of it and more life lessons in a decade than most get in a lifetime. Not to mention picking up a Master's in Entrepreneurship at Oklahoma State University.
When it was time to come back to Ohio and settle down, I joined a national consulting firm, CapTech, and grew my expertise in technologies like cloud, data, and AI while working for big names and big teams. Then I took a step back from consulting to lead engineering and IT at a biotech company. It was the kind of job where they didn't know what they needed or how they were going to build it. A few years later I had hired 12 people to build their next generation platform that the company runs on today.
Today, I spend my time again in independent consulting, mainly around AI and what it can do for companies. I love the backend magic, the behind the scenes and the automation, the things that give people their time back so they work on the high-value items, not the drudgery.
But why insurance? I'm ready to own and run a business rather than advise on a dozen. I've spent a career on managing people, solving tough problems, working inside regulation and constraint, and keeping clients happy.
Sure, I haven't done it all. I haven't bought or sold a company. So, I'm reading everything I can find, and I'm in the middle of evaluating lenders. But more importantly, I'm building my network in this new industry. Even if you're not someone looking to sell, I'd love to get to know more about what you do and why.
I live in Columbus with my wife and our four kids. I play guitar and I'm always working on my Spanish. I hold several technical certifications alongside an Ohio property and casualty license.
My Philosophies
- Retention
- The whole game. The customer that trusts you the most is the one you already have.
- Management
- Keeping your people happy by clearing blockers and then staying out of it. Build things that outlast you — you should be able to walk away for a week. Give people radical ownership and transparency.
- Mistakes
- Information, not shame. Find the actual cause, fix the system that let it happen, tell everyone what changed. When it's a person who slipped, the lesson comes before the stick.
- Systems
- People make mistakes. Domain knowledge can't be held in one person's head. If you rely on information or processes that aren't written down to do the job well, it's only a matter of time before something goes wrong.
- Buy-in
- Early adopters. Internal champions. Small wins. Start small and prove it. You can't mandate it.
- Technology
- It should remove the work nobody wanted to do, not the people who did it. Sometimes the most powerful technology is the boring kind.
- Data-driven
- Define success. Gather data, measure, iterate, repeat. You can't vibe your way to success.
- Disagreement
- You can understand somebody without agreeing with them; most people just need to know you actually heard them.
This was about a team of contractors I'd been handed after being warned about them. It has nothing to do with insurance, which is most of the reason it's here.
“Trust isn't granted — it's modeled. If you want a team that trusts each other, you have to go first.”