Thirty-one years in physical security.

I spent 16 years running multi-site security deployments and operations for a global consumer brand, ending as the senior-most security executive in the organization. The programs I owned covered enterprise security technology, emergency preparedness, behavioral threat assessment, and physical security across a retail and food service estate spanning a dozen countries.

The work I'm proudest of: leading the global migration from analog camera systems to a single enterprise IP video management platform across 11,000 locations in 12 countries. Not a pilot, not one region — every site, one platform, while the business kept operating. Projects at that scale fail on the parts nobody quotes: network readiness, retrofit sequencing, regional compliance, the installers you'll never meet, and the service model that has to survive after the integrator's crew leaves.

Then I ran it. Remote health monitoring across tens of thousands of devices, firmware and lifecycle management, and break/fix delivered through third-party integrators in markets where we had no local staff. A system that works on handover day is a different thing from a system that still works in year three. That operating experience is rarer than the deployment experience — and it is usually what a client turns out to be short of.

Before that, 15 years on the other side of the table: security integration operations management, fire alarm design and deployment, security system design and deployment, facility management, and emergency management.

That combination is why clients call. I've sold and installed these systems, and I've bought them at enterprise scale. I can usually tell within an hour whether the proposal on your desk is reasonable — and, more often, what it's quietly missing.