I did not set out to do this. I started as an engineer.
Before any of this, I was one of the youngest functional test engineers in the aerospace industry. That job taught me something I have never stopped using: when a system fails, you do not guess. You isolate the variable. You find the specific point where the thing went wrong, and you fix that.
Sales turned out to be the same problem in a different costume. A rep who loses a deal usually cannot tell you why. They will say the homeowner was a tire-kicker, or the price was too high, or the competitor lowballed them. Almost none of that is true. What actually happened is that at a specific moment in the conversation, something went sideways — and if you can find that moment, you can train it.
Twenty years in the field
I sold. Then I led sales teams. Then I ran sales organizations in roofing and home improvement. I have sat at kitchen tables, run ride-alongs in the rain, and rebuilt comp plans that were quietly destroying the culture they were meant to reward. Everything I teach came out of that, not out of a textbook.
The pattern I kept seeing: owners who were the best closer in their own company, and who could not understand why the business would not grow past them. That is not a sales problem. That is a system problem, and it is the one I most enjoy fixing.
TOP REP
I founded TOP REP to make that system teachable. The name is a registered trademark — U.S. Reg. No. 7,557,419, registered November 5, 2024, covering business and sales training services. Programs run from individual coaching through full team training and sales leadership development, for roofing, remodeling, electrical, plumbing, HVAC, and adjacent trades.
Written work
Three works on sales and leadership, spanning a decade. The most recent, Complete Field Guide to Successful Sales Leadership, took two years to write and carries a foreword by Brian Gottlieb.
Where I show up
Thirty-eight recorded conversations since 2018 — podcasts, masterclasses, and long-form interviews — plus six bylined articles in Roofing Contractor magazine and main-stage sessions at industry events. The complete list, with a source link on every entry, lives on the TOP REP media page.
Off the clock
I live in Kettering, Ohio with my wife and our four kids. Most of what I know about patience I learned there, not at work.