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What are your main duties as director of operations?

My responsibilities would be overseeing the engineers of the building; overseeing the operations supervisors – who basically set and strike for the different events, so they are setting up and taking everything away – and the engineers, who take care of the building; and then overall budget analysis and monitoring.

You started at the end of January. How have your first days on the job been?

They have been fantastic. The facilities themselves have been run perfectly. It’s great to come into a situation like this, where I can concentrate on things that I want to concentrate on and don’t have to look at the other side of the issues.

What is your goal for 2009?

My main goal is to continue the operation the way it’s run and try to improve on some things, try to cut expenses where we can and just overall learn the facilities for my own benefit. You’re always trying to maintain a facility in its most efficient manner, so we are looking at the electrical, the expenses, seeing where we can cut, seeing how we can become more efficient in the buildings as far as our energy usage, so that’s probably the main priority. When things break, you have to replace them, you have to fix them, but if you can cut your energy costs, that is usually the huge savings, and when you combine that with four buildings, it’s very important.

You moved to the East Coast after college. What made you want to come back to Iowa?

I got transferred here. Not that I didn’t want to come back; I just didn’t think I would really have a chance to. So one day, (Global Spectrum) called me, and they said, “What do you think about going to Des Moines, Iowa?” And I was like, “Fantastic. I’m from there, I know everything about it and all of my long-term friends are there.”

What do you think your area of expertise is?

My expertise would just be management. Previously, I came out to the East Coast as a sports turf manager. I was a sports turf manager for a group of Maryland (baseball) teams and they were bought by Comcast Spectacor (LP), which is Global Spectrum’s parent company, so that is how I got in with the Global Spectrum family. From there, I went to Athens and was the field manager for the Olympic Games for baseball, and then came back and got in with the Washington Nationals with Global. So I guess my expertise is just management in different, diverse situations.

What has been the highlight of your career thus far?

Definitely being in Greece and working the Olympic Games, then coming back to the island of Crete as I was working on a golf course there as a consultant for eight months. It was just amazing: the landscape there, the people, how difficult the job was but also how satisfying it was in the same respect. And the history. Growing up in Iowa, there really isn’t a whole lot of history. One hundred and fifty years seems like history here, but when you go to Athens and you are in the center city block and there are buildings that have been there for 3,000 years and they are made of marble, and the streets are made of marble, it’s absolutely amazing.

Have you traveled to other places?

Right after the Olympics, I went to Holland for 10 days and helped build a couple of baseball fields for the World Cup of Baseball, which was the following year, and I went to Venezuela in 2000 to build a couple of baseball fields for Major League Baseball.

What did you see yourself doing as a child?

Actually, I was always into the horticulture side. I used to mow lawns as a kid to get money for college, so I’d save up a lot of money that way. I had three or four lawns that I would mow, and I would do some special projects like that. I noticed that groundskeeping is more of a passion that I would like to do in my spare time, not so much as a career. So when Global came in and bought the (Maryland) teams in 2001, I started switching over to more of the facilities management side. Getting back into Global is a way of progressing my career into where I really want to be, which is more of the facilities management side.