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.
I've spent more than thirteen years doing this work. Moderating conversations and interviews with best-selling authors, Fortune 5 and Fortune 500 CEOs, heads of state and public figures. Hosting dozens of dinners and events from the front of the room. Leading virtual sessions for hundreds of senior executives at once. Most of it happens in private, which is exactly why it works, and why I rarely talk about the rooms themselves.
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 · Facilitation
Helping teams connect
The same instinct shows up in a smaller room. Not every team needs a community or a conference. Sometimes what they need is a few honest hours together, designed on purpose. I facilitate sessions for leadership teams and companies investing in their people, built around where a team actually is rather than a generic agenda: alignment when direction has drifted, trust when too much is going unsaid, clarity on where everyone's energy should go next.
When it helps, those sessions pair with a hands-on culinary experience at The Local Epicurean. To be clear, I'm not the chef and I don't teach the class. Our instructors lead the cooking, I lead the conversation around it, and it only happens together, at one of our TLE locations. The shared act of making something simply turns out to be one of the most reliable ways I know to get a team genuinely present with one another.
03 · 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.
04 · Exploration
Why gathering matters
The longer I work across both worlds, the more convinced I am that they're connected. Hospitality, leadership, community, food, wine, travel and experience design all seem deeply linked.
They shape how people experience a place, a meal, a conversation, a team or a community.
The Gathering Project is my attempt to better understand those connections through observation, reflection and practice. It's an ongoing exploration of hospitality and human connection, documented from the places where people come together.
Connect
Always glad to compare notes.
On hospitality, leadership, community building or the small details that make people feel at home.