Why I Started
Cacti Analytics

I grew up in Murrieta, California - a suburb in Southern California that sits right in that sweet spot between the mountains, the desert, and the coast. If you know it, you know it. If you don't, just picture sun-bleached sidewalks, open space, and kids who had no business being as free as we were.

I was one of those kids. Barefoot most of the time, outside all day, always in some sport or another. I played everything - football, soccer, basketball - the kind of childhood where your mom had to yell for you from the front porch because you'd been gone since breakfast and your phone went straight to voicemail. We didn't spend a lot of time overthinking things. We just went outside and figured it out.

My childhood built something in me that I didn't have a name for at the time. A comfort with not having a clear plan. A bias toward action. A belief that if you just get out there and move, things have a way of working themselves out.

The Decision That Changed Everything

I had every intention of going to college straight out of high school. I started down that road - but then financial aid stopped coming in, and the road dead-ended real fast. I needed a new plan, and I needed one quickly.

So in 2019, I joined the military.

I went in as a Medic, which felt like a calling at the time. I've always been someone who wants to be useful, who wants to solve a real problem for a real person - and what's more real than helping someone in a medical crisis? It felt right. I was proud of it.

Then 2020 happened.

COVID changed everything for everyone. For me, it changed the trajectory of my entire career. I was in the thick of it as a Medic, watching the system respond to something it wasn't prepared for. It was a crash course in stress management - both from the human side of things, but also in supply chain stress, and what happens when the right things aren't in the right place at the right time. I learned a tremendous amount - about people, about pressure, about how organizations actually function when the stakes are real.

But it also made one thing clear: the medical field wasn't where I was supposed to land. That chapter taught me exactly what I needed to learn, and then it was done.

Finding Supply Chain

I stumbled into supply chain the way a lot of people find the things that actually fit them - by accident, and then all at once.

What I found was that supply chain management is, at its core, an endless series of puzzles. Why did this part cost more from this supplier than that one? Why is this lead time inconsistent? What's the hidden cost that everyone's pretending isn't there? Where's the bottleneck, and why has nobody fixed it? Every question leads to another question, and somewhere in that maze is an answer that actually solves a problem.

I was hooked immediately.

I started looking into schools. Michigan State came up as number one for supply chain. ASU was number two. Under normal circumstances, that would've been an easy call.

But here's the thing - I was stationed in Tacoma, Washington. Thirty minutes south of Seattle. And if you've spent any time in the Pacific Northwest, you know: it's beautiful, and it will absolutely drain the life out of a Southern California kid. Grey skies. Constant rain. The kind of overcast that settles in around October and doesn't leave until June.

The Gap I Couldn't Stop Seeing

Everything that followed - the degree, the internships, the roles, the skills - it all moved in one direction, even when I couldn't see the destination clearly. I maintained course.

The more I worked in procurement and supply chain, the more I kept running into the same problem: the tools and the thinking that drive real competitive advantage in this space are mostly locked away inside large organizations. Enterprise companies have entire teams dedicated to spend analytics, supplier intelligence, and procurement strategy. They have dashboards that tell them exactly where their money is going and exactly where they're leaving value on the table.

Smaller businesses don't have that. And a lot of them don't even know they should.

That gap started to bother me. Not in an academic way - in a "this is obviously a real problem with an obvious solution" kind of way. The kind of thing where you see it once, then you can't unsee it. Procurement intelligence pays for itself. Spend visibility pays for itself. Knowing your total cost of ownership before you sign a contract, knowing which suppliers are quietly costing you more than they should, having someone in your corner who can look at what you're spending and tell you where the waste is - that stuff pays for itself, fast.

That's the kind of value that makes sense. And when something makes sense to me, I can talk about it all day - trust me, ask those closest to me. I can explain it, defend it, and believe wholeheartedly in my ability to deliver it, because it's not a sales pitch. It's just the truth.

That's why Cacti Analytics exists.

Why "Cacti"

People ask about the name. It's worth explaining.

I'm an Arizona guy now. And the more time I've spent here, the more I've come to appreciate the cactus - not as a quirky symbol, but as a genuine philosophy.

A cactus doesn't need much. It's built to thrive in conditions that would take out almost anything else. It stores what it needs, uses resources efficiently, and doesn't ask for a perfect environment to do its job. It just grows - quietly, steadily, and with a kind of durability that sneaks up on you.

That's the kind of thinking I believe in. Lean. Efficient. Built for the long haul. Not flashy for the sake of it, but deeply effective when it counts.

And there's something else. The cactus has a reputation for being harsh, prickly, hard to approach. But if you know what you're looking at - if you actually understand it - you see something resilient, structured, and purposeful. Good procurement thinking is exactly that. It can seem technical or intimidating from the outside, but once it clicks, it's elegant. It just makes sense.

I grew up barefoot in Southern California. I served my country. I got rained on in Tacoma. I found my puzzle.

Now I'm here.