I have spent my career inside industrial technology. I started on the manufacturer's side and worked through the channel, engaging closely with distributors, contractors, and the customers they serve.

It began with an engineering degree from Michigan State University, which gave me the systems thinking and supply chain lens I still use to read a manufacturer's business. At Schneider Electric, I put that lens to work selling power distribution, quoting unit substations, switchgear, and transformers through the distributor and contractor channels that actually move industrial product. That work teaches you something no strategy deck can: how long an industrial buying cycle really runs, how many people quietly hold veto power, and how far the distance is between a good product and a signed deal. I learned how to read that distance before I learned how to close it.

After six years at Schneider, I went to Indiana University's Kelley School of Business for my MBA, interning at 3M along the way on 5G and food-safety systems and seeing how global industrial problems get solved at scale. Kelley gave me the other half: the language of the business case, and the attribution model that turns a good idea into a funded one. I learned that language on purpose.

After Kelley, I crossed to the other side of the table. As a Partner Development Manager at Microsoft, I evaluated more than one hundred partner solutions across two dozen companies, and I sat in the rooms where co-sell decisions actually got made. I watched which industrial solutions the field leaned into and which ones quietly stalled. It was rarely about product quality, or even strategy. It was about whether a partner had made themselves easy to say yes to, and that usually came down to whether their case was framed in the language the money speaks.

Then I took a third seat at the table. As a Senior Partner Manager at a rebate management ISV serving manufacturers and distributors, I was the partner asking for Microsoft's attention instead of the one deciding where it went. I was brought in to build a co-sell and GTM motion from the ISV side, running three tracks at once across the US, EMEA, and APAC. In five months, Partner Center pipeline grew from 14 opportunities to 82, and the company closed its first Marketplace billed sales. Knowing what the field wants is one thing. Delivering it from the partner side, with partner-side resources, is the work my clients are actually doing.

That is the whole reason Paulk Advisory exists. I have stood in the industrial seller's shoes, I have held the Microsoft pen, and I have sat in the partner's chair asking the field to lean in. There are people who understand Microsoft's programs, people who understand the industrial buying cycle, and people who have built a co-sell motion from inside an ISV. I have done all three. That is the vantage point I bring to every engagement, with results you can measure in your own numbers.

AT A GLANCE