The Story

Thirty years of work across custom paint, fabrication, manufacturing, commercial interiors, product development, murals, business operations, and AI systems can look like a collection of separate careers.

It is not.

The throughline has always been the same: understand what is really being asked for, identify the variables that matter, build a better system around them, and execute with enough precision that the result holds up in the real world.

Sweet Air Custom Paint — Bozeman, Montana (1996–2003)

It started in a leaky two-car garage in Bozeman with a home-built spray booth and a self-taught approach to motorcycle paint.

The early work came through dealership repair jobs and word of mouth. What began as refinishing quickly became a deeper education in process control: surface preparation, temperature, humidity, material behavior, masking, sequencing, color, finish quality, and the consequences of getting any one variable wrong.

That work eventually led to a production-paint contract with Thunder Mountain Custom Cycles in Fort Collins and established the first version of a pattern that would repeat throughout the next three decades: learn the system, understand where it breaks down, and improve it.

Gunslinger Custom Paint — Denver, Colorado (2003–2004)

I was hired to paint motorcycles. Within months, I was redesigning how the shop produced them.

Instead of accepting repetition as a fixed cost, I developed template-overlay tooling that reduced paint time per piece by more than 30% and mapped labor requirements by process step. The objective was simple: improve consistency, increase throughput, and remove wasted effort without lowering the quality bar.

The system worked. My individual output reached roughly five times that of comparable three-person production teams.

The bigger lesson was not about paint. It was about systems.

I realized I was most valuable when I could understand a process, identify friction, and redesign the workflow around a better result.

“I don’t do repetitious work. I do unique work.”

That line still holds, but the meaning has evolved. The goal is not to avoid repeatable systems. It is to build repeatable systems that free people from unnecessary repetition.

True Kustom — From Paint Shop to Product Manufacturer (2004–2016)

True Kustom began as a custom paint shop on a high-traffic motorcycle corridor south of Denver. It grew into something much larger: complete motorcycle customization, fabrication, electrical integration, product development, manufacturing, and international parts sales.

At its peak, the business included a team of up to 10, a bench of subcontractors, and a vendor network of roughly 20, including overseas manufacturing partners.

The work expanded from one-off custom motorcycles into engineered products. A flush LED-integrated fender line was developed across three Harley-Davidson platform generations with OEM-matched wiring and hardware kits. A signature air-ride “pogo” seat system raised automatically on ignition and became both a functional product and a recurring showpiece that generated new client work wherever it appeared.

True Kustom gained national exposure through Discovery Channel’s American Guns, sponsored-artist status with SATA, independent magazine coverage, and a recurring SEMA presence. A working relationship with DiRico Motorcycles has continued for more than 15 years.

The business also delivered one of the most important lessons of my career.

Technical quality alone does not make a business healthy.

The same meticulousness that produced high-level work could also consume too many hours, narrow margins, and make the operation harder to scale. Closing True Kustom in December 2016 forced a sharper understanding of scope, profitability, systems, and where craftsmanship creates value versus where it creates unnecessary drag.

That lesson now informs every consulting, design, and engineering engagement.

BD Wall Art — Large-Scale Visual Work (2017–2023)

Within about a year of closing True Kustom, a referral from the paint industry led to a commercial mural project.

That opened another chapter.

BD Wall Art grew into commissioned commercial and civic mural work, including pieces over 200 square feet and projects such as Solstice Ink in Denver.

The medium changed, but the underlying process did not.

The work still required reading a client, understanding the physical environment, managing scale, surface conditions, composition, access, scheduling, and execution. The difference was that the “product” was now the wall itself.

BD Wall Art also overlapped with the beginning of Cidre House Design, reinforcing another long-running pattern: capabilities tend to expand by layering onto one another rather than replacing what came before.

Cidre House Design — Commercial Interior Design, Retail Engineering & Product Development (2019–Present)

Cidre House Design started unexpectedly.

A mural client who bought and sold dispensaries needed corrective mural work and asked whether I could also build custom display cases.

I did not yet know Fusion 360.

So I learned it.

That first display-case project became the entry point into commercial interior design, retail engineering, manufacturing, and a growing catalog of custom fixtures.

The important shift was not simply learning CAD. It was realizing that the best design decisions happened before CAD opened.

A successful commercial project depends on understanding the business first: operations, product mix, staff workflow, customer flow, security, accessibility, storage, merchandising, installation, and how the space needs to make people feel.

That approach became the foundation of the work.

Mana Supply became the clearest full-scale expression of it across four locations and two states. Xclusive demonstrated the same capability under extreme execution constraints, with three operating dispensaries converted overnight without losing a trading day. Weedery brought murals, fixtures, licensing documentation, and commercial buildout together in a single engagement.

The work evolved from “designing interiors” into something broader:

understand the business, engineer the environment around it, and make the result buildable.

Integrity and on-time delivery are non-negotiable, even when the value of doing it correctly is not immediately visible.

CIVRAH — Systems Thinking Applied to Business

CIVRAH means Truth By Design.

The idea is straightforward: understand what is actually happening before deciding what should be built.

That philosophy grew naturally from decades of physical work.

Custom paint is failure-intolerant and variable-dense. Temperature, humidity, surface condition, solvent behavior, application sequence, material compatibility, and timing all interact. Manufacturing introduces another layer of variables: tooling, tolerances, materials, hardware, assembly, sourcing, labor, and field conditions.

Business systems are not fundamentally different.

They also contain interacting variables, bottlenecks, waste, handoffs, hidden assumptions, and failure points.

AI entered that work as a tool, not as an identity.

The value is not “using AI.” The value is applying AI, automation, structured data, and workflow design where they can remove repetitive work, improve visibility, organize knowledge, or help people make better decisions faster.

That has led to working systems for lead generation, research automation, intake, reporting, knowledge management, and business-process support.

The same diagnostic process that once applied to paint, fabrication, and manufacturing now applies to information systems.

The substrate changed again.

The method did not.

See The Spark Method for the four-stage process that formalizes it: Listen → Design → Refine → Execute.

The Next Chapter

The current direction is less about starting another separate business and more about consolidating three decades of capability into a clearer professional model.

Commercial design, product development, manufacturing, fabrication, systems thinking, and AI-assisted workflow design increasingly operate as one integrated skill set.

That creates a different kind of value: the ability to enter a complex problem without being limited to one discipline, understand what the real constraint is, and move between strategy, design, engineering, production, and implementation as the project requires.

North County San Diego is part of that next chapter.

The region represents an opportunity to apply the same capabilities beyond cannabis retail and into broader commercial, wellness, hospitality, product-development, manufacturing, and consulting environments where physical space, operational systems, and customer experience intersect.

The move is not the story.

The work leading to it is.

The Orchard Collective

Some ideas remain intentionally dormant until the right timing and context return.

The Orchard Collective is one of them: a public-speaking and live-art platform built around communication, creativity, and personal development.

The signature talk, Love B.A.C.K., has been delivered multiple times since 2020.

It remains available as a future extension of the same broader work: understanding people, translating ideas, and creating experiences that connect.

→ theorchardcollective.com

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Thirty Years of Reading the Room

I have been a multi-instrumentalist for roughly 30 years—guitar, bass, drums, production—and a DJ for about a decade.

That belongs here because it reflects the same underlying ability that appears throughout the professional work.

A musician has to listen to what is happening, recognize patterns, anticipate change, adjust in real time, and understand how an audience is responding before anyone explains it.

The medium is different, but the skill is familiar.

A client conversation, a production floor, a retail environment, a live room, and a complex business process all contain signals.

The work begins by learning how to read them.

Competitive against the last result, not against other people.