Your Automation Advocate

I grew up on the floor of my dad's shop, Hard Design & Build, watching him build a custom automation business from a drafting table at Burke E Porter into his own shop — and, later, watching it close. Growing up around a builder, not a buyer, taught me two things early: what real craftsmanship in automation looks like, and how the sales side of this industry actually operates.

I earned a criminal justice degree from GVSU and later ranked first in my law school class of 330, but the practice of law wasn't for me. What stuck was the reasoning — the ability to take apart a complicated problem and find the real issue underneath it.

I brought that back to automation. I ran the AS9100 quality and purchasing program for an aerospace-focused machine builder, helped grow a two-person robotics integrator into a $3M, 20-person company, and led multi-state operations for a national distributor. Every stop taught me a different piece of how these projects actually get bought, built, and run — and how often they go wrong.

Connecting Automation exists because I've spent my life on the builder's side of this industry, and I know how it looks from there. Now I use that view for the other side of the table — yours.