A strong work ethic from a young age
I grew up in the primarily blue-collar town of Dubuque, Iowa. My parents have been married for 53 years and have seven children – I am the third youngest. As a middle-class family, we had everything we needed, but we worked hard for it. I was raised to believe that nothing is handed to you, and if you wanted something, you had to earn it. If I wanted baseball cards, name-brand sneakers, or a hot lunch from the school cafeteria versus my mom’s packed lunch, I had to pay for it.
This led me to my first job of delivering newspapers on the famous Grandview Avenue at the age of 10. Grandview Avenue was a tough route. It spans the entire city from north to south with plenty of hills. The road ends on a beautiful bluff overlooking the entire city, which was the spot where I routinely took a quick break to catch my breath and take in the view. While it was not fun waking up at 4 a.m. on Sundays or going straight from school to my paper route, I now realize that my upbringing instilled positive values that led me to where I am today.
Making the leap into entrepreneurship
My childhood experiences shaped many of the core beliefs that I have brought into my work and family life, including a strong work ethic, accountability, integrity, and never taking anything for granted. I continued to bring these values to every job I had through college and the first decade of my career. I was never too good for a task, never missed a deadline even if it meant skipping a night or two of sleep, and treated others the way I wanted to be treated.
After spending more than a decade at large financial institutions gaining experience in data management and analytics for both corporate and structured finance, I was recruited by my former executive team to join them in starting an investment servicing company as their Head of Analytics and Data Management. I was responsible for all things data and technology. I quickly grew from a savvy analyst to a solutions architect, designing and developing complex solutions to meet the demands of our clients and their investors.
After a few years of becoming more technical than I ever strived to be, I realized my passion for problem-solving in client-facing roles and decided consulting would be a way to combine my financial, technical, and relationship management skills. In 2011, I joined a boutique consulting firm as a Principal in their financial services practice.
Repeatedly seeing the same types of data and technology challenges across clients fueled the entrepreneurial spirit in me. I knew there was a better way to solve common pain points and my mix of expertise working with complex teams, organizations, technology, and financial concepts gave me the professional confidence to start my own consulting firm.
In 2014, I started Grandview Analytics (named for my childhood paper route!) with Chris Lamb, a former manager and someone who shares my values of hard work and high ethical standards. Chris saw the vision and the market need. Without hesitation, he was ready to embark on this journey with me. We spent the next 10 years growing Grandview Analytics into a trusted brand in technology and data consulting for investment management and financial services firms.
Expanding into software development
Along the way, we built a cloud-based data management and reporting platform: Rivvit. We repeatedly got requests from asset managers and other financial services clients to build custom data management and data warehouse solutions. They were all struggling with the same issues and using the same types of data. We would build those solutions but then the clients often had no one on staff who could maintain the solution going forward. It was expensive, time-consuming, and difficult for clients to manage. We knew there had to be a better way.
In a past consulting gig, we had met Greg Dziad and Reid Turner, two brilliant technologists who had been solving these problems for their clients. We teamed up with them to develop Rivvit, which is a take on the word “rivet”. Just as rivets are used to join and strengthen large structures, we would build Rivvit to unite fragmented data and systems into a single reliable source of data that empowers smarter decisions.
We built Rivvit to make data management and reporting as easy as possible for our clients and I believe we’ve achieved it! It’s a SaaS platform that automates data integration, data quality management, data operations and investment workflows, and reporting. We built it on a low-code framework, which means we can rapidly launch clients onto the platform and easily adapt to new and changing data sources and reporting needs. Clients are consistently amazed at the speed and simplicity with which they can get a single source of gold copy data for their business using Rivvit.
In 2025, we separated Grandview Analytics and Rivvit Inc. into two independent companies, allowing each to focus on their unique client value propositions.
While it was difficult to walk away from Grandview Analytics, a company I had poured my life into building over a 10 year period, I know it is in the most capable hands, and I’m thrilled to be taking Rivvit into a new era, where we will have a laser focus on making data management unbelievably easy for our clients.
As the former CEO of Grandview Analytics, and now the CEO of Rivvit, I continue to honor the values from my upbringing. As much as I look to our team for their subject matter expertise, I also value soft skills of relationship building and the ability to truly understand and empathize with clients at an individual and personal level. This leads to longstanding relationships built on trust.
It’s been a long time since my early years in Dubuque, Iowa. The core principles I learned at a young age permeate how Rivvit conducts its business – they will be a key ingredient in Rivvit’s success.