About
A builder of communities, businesses, and experiences.
I spend my professional life in two worlds that rarely meet — leading executive communities through World 50 and building hospitality businesses through The 601 Group. I've come to believe they're the same work, asking the same question from different rooms.
Across a twenty-five-year career, I've moved from leading operations and supply chains to leading executive communities — and, more recently, to building hospitality businesses of my own.
By day, I lead communities of senior executives, sitting in on the conversations that shape some of the world's most respected companies. By night and weekend, I'm an operator: opening restaurants, running cooking classes, learning what it actually takes to make a guest feel cared for. The combination is unusual. It's also the most honest description of who I am — equal parts student and operator, always circling the same fascination with how people come together.
01 — Community
Building communities
As Executive Director at World 50, I help lead peer communities for the executives who run the world's largest and most admired companies. The role is part facilitator, part host, part student — creating the conditions in which guarded, accomplished people can actually speak candidly with one another.
What I've learned there is that a great community isn't a roster; it's a feeling of safety and belonging that has to be designed and protected. The agenda earns trust. The unstructured hour spends it. Facilitating those conversations among senior leaders has taught me more about hospitality than any restaurant ever could — and convinced me that meaningful professional community is something you build deliberately, not something that simply happens.
02 — Hospitality
Building hospitality businesses
Through The 601 Group, I build hospitality brands worth coming back to. Founded in Michigan and built to grow, the company creates distinctive dining and culinary experiences rooted in craft, community, and connection.
Today that includes The Local Epicurean in Grand Rapids and East Lansing — a specialty market and immersive culinary destination where great food is meant to be shared — alongside For Crêpe Sake, a beloved East Lansing crêperie, and Brown Butter Crêperie, a Grand Rapids staple born as a food truck. Each is an experiment in the same idea: that a business can be both a place to eat and a reason to gather. More hospitality ventures are on the way, each built around experience rather than just transaction.
03 — Exploration
Why gathering matters
The longer I work across both worlds, the more I'm convinced they're connected. Hospitality, leadership, community, food, wine, travel, and experience design all seem to orbit one question:
Why do people gather?
The Gathering Project is my attempt to take that question seriously — an ongoing exploration of what creates genuine human connection, documented through field notes from the places where people come together. It isn't a blog or a newsletter. It's the running record of a curiosity I can't put down.
Connect
Always glad to compare notes.
On hospitality, leadership, community building, or the small details that make people feel at home.