Before the strategy work, before the CRO title, there was a stage — and years of learning what actually makes a story land.
I didn't set out to become a strategist or TV producer. I set out to be an actor, and for years, that's exactly what I was — professionally, on stages that don't hand out roles lightly. Major commercial productions of West Side Story, Cats, Oklahoma, the original company of Sunset Boulevard. Original plays at The Royal Court and other venues.
Theatre trains a very particular instinct: you learn, in real time, whether a room is with you or not. There's no deck to hide behind and no follow-up email to clarify what you meant — you say the thing, and it either lands or it doesn't. Sometimes those rooms are filled with 2000 people. That instinct, reading what's actually true in a room — versus what merely sounds good — is the same one I use now to figure out what a company's story should be before I figure out how to tell it.
The shift wasn't one dramatic moment so much as a pattern I kept noticing: the skills that made a scene work — pacing, clarity, knowing exactly what an audience needs to feel and when — were the same skills missing from the executive communication, investor pitches, and brand positioning I ran into once I moved through TV production, advertising, and eventually business leadership. Nobody handed me a playbook for that jump. I built one myself, industry by industry, until it stopped looking like a series of career changes and started looking like what I know it to be — one skill applied to different rooms.
London's Royal Court Theatre, the BBC; Equity, SAG-AFTRA and Dramatists Guild of America member.
Built the instinct to read a room in real time: pacing, tension, and the exact moment attention turns.
Member of the Directors Guild of America and the Producers Guild of America, Emmy-nominated producer, hundreds of hours of network TV
Built the discipline of shaping a narrative inside hard constraints: runtime, budget, and an audience that can walk in seconds.
Oscar-qualified short film writer/director
Built structure: the mechanics of how a story's shape decides whether an emotional beat lands.
Award-winning producer
Built compression: saying the true thing in a fraction of the time you're actually given.
Fractional CRO at ThermaGel Innovations, startup advisor, Founder Institute mentor, university Entrepreneur-in-Residence
Proof the same instincts hold up in a boardroom, not just on a stage or a set.
Different industries, same throughline: understand the room before you try to move it.
Every founder and executive I work with now has some version of the same problem I kept running into across industries — a real story, often buried under noise, jargon, or a version of events that sounds good but isn't quite true. That's the work: finding the context first, then building the story that's actually earned.
