About

I’m from Idaho. I started working at twelve, and by fifteen I had a full-time job at a grocery store while I was still in high school. I joined the family agency in 2001, and the same year I co-founded El Centro, insurance and financial services for the Spanish-speaking community. After that I kept starting things: a bookkeeping company, a tax-prep company, a mortgage company, a real estate company. They’re all still successful, in Idaho, and none of them is mine to run. I have three kids, and I raised them the other way, on purpose. I was raised Mormon. I spent about forty years inside it and left, and I kept the things worth keeping. I was in therapy for the first time, in my forties, finally putting words to things I’d spent four decades walking past.

I love small business and small business owners. Period. I’ve been a business owner my whole profession, and I’ve worn every hat there is: hired, fired, made payroll, paid my own work comp and liability, sat through the audits. My own desk is about 150 owners, a number where I actually know your file. I’d rather have a hundred clients I actually know than a thousand names in a system.

I’m a small business owner who happens to understand insurance. I’ve never run a company with more than fifty employees. I built and sold my largest business, and these days it’s me, one assistant, and the system I built.

An office in Idaho Falls, where I am every month, and my desk in Utah, where I live.

The longer version of the businesses is on its own page.

Father. For years, every school morning, my kids got the same sentence out the car window: good habits, good friends, good grades, in that order. Both of the college kids still text me to go to lunch or a movie, which I take as the grade.

Husband. Twenty-five years this year. We ride e-bikes together, and every Sunday morning mom and dad buy everybody a drink.

Friend. With close friends, people who seemed to accept me no matter what, I could just say the thing. No stuttering. No dry mouth. I belonged there.

Son. My dad started in insurance in the eighties and founded the family agency in 1998. I joined him in 2001 and I’m still there.

Philosophy. Physics. Movies. I ride a road bike on paved trails, not mountain trails, and my wife and I ride e-bikes together. I make leather belts by hand, full-grain, under the name Heretic, one line stamped on the inside where only the person wearing it will ever see it: to thine owne selfe be true. The truth is I’m just combining two things I love: I love learning about the people throughout history who wanted to make things a little bit better, and I love making. There’s a Jeep, there are motorcycles, and there’s as much outdoors as I can get. Music is desert psych rock and folk-punk, mostly, and a family playlist where everybody puts on what they like and everybody listens.