I didn’t start MayThe5th to build another empire. I started it because I was done and needed clarity.

After six companies, countless highs and lows, and years of answering to investors, boards, and shareholders, I realized I’d spent most of my career creating clarity for others, but rarely for myself. I’d built teams across continents, negotiated multimillion-dollar deals, and learned the hard way what happens when ambition outpaces alignment.

When I finally stepped back, I understood something simple but powerful:

I no longer wanted to build bigger. I wanted to build better, for others.

The Origin Story

The name MayThe5th isn’t a clever play on “May the 4th.” or “Star Wars” It’s my son’s birthday.

I came up with it one evening while thinking about what we’d do for his celebration. I wanted a name that reminded me of why I work, and for whom. My wife and I both have his birthdate tattooed in Roman numerals, and that “V”, the 5, immediately stood out to me. In it, I saw a checkmark.

A checkmark means quality. Precision. Completion.

It’s that feeling when things just work.

That symbol became the foundation of my philosophy: helping small and mid-sized businesses as well as government authorities cut through the noise, focus on what truly moves the needle, and execute with clarity, discipline, and measurable results.

At this point in my life, that’s what I love most, helping others. Whether it’s a friend launching a French company in the U.S. or a founder struggling to source from Asia, I realized I’d been consulting informally for years. I loved solving problems that others avoided: the messy middle between strategy and execution.

That’s how MayThe5th was born: not as a reaction to burnout, but as a transition to purpose.

Hard Lessons That Built My Framework

The first time I truly understood risk was during my fourth venture in France.

We had a letter of intent for $15 million from a U.S. company expanding into Europe, everything seemed perfect. We signed the documents, celebrated, and then they botched their NASDAQ listing. Their shares collapsed from $17 to $0.17 overnight.

We’d just paid half a million euros in slotting fees – our entire cash reserve – to secure a retail deal ahead of the acquisition. Within two months, we lost everything.

That experience taught me something I never forgot: ambition without contingency is a gamble.

No matter how exciting the opportunity, until it’s real, it’s not real. Always have a backup plan. Always keep enough oxygen in the system to survive the storm.

That’s why today, when I help founders or executives optimize operations or scale, I start with redundancy and resilience. Great growth is built on margin for error.

The Moment I Knew I Needed to Change

Fast forward to The Blinc Group, my sixth venture. It was the first time I stayed in a company I’d founded for more than four years — eight, in fact.

We had grown from a scrappy startup to a multimillion-dollar organization with $16 million in revenue and nearly $2 million in EBITDA by the end of 2023. I hired a fantastic COO, and together we had our best year yet. When I stepped down and handed him the CEO role, I thought I was creating continuity.

Instead, everything changed overnight.

My goal in 2024 was to find a acquirer for the company while focusing on my voluntary work. In October 2024, we got a letter of intent for … drumroll … $15 million USD (remember that number above for my venture in France …).

But within that year, profits shrank, employees began leaving, and the culture that once felt like family started to crumble. I’d built a company where I knew every team member’s spouse and kids by name and suddenly, I was getting calls from people saying they didn’t recognize the place anymore.

It was gutting.

That’s when I realized something deeper: growth means nothing if you lose alignment. Culture, transparency, and execution discipline aren’t “soft” factors. They’re the backbone of every sustainable company.

That moment planted the seed for The Business Acceleration Track at MayThe5th, a consulting model that identifies and fixes the 20% of activities that drive 80% of impact. It’s not about working harder; it’s about working smarter, faster, and clearer.

When Success Became Redefined

There was a moment at Blinc that still moves me more than any funding round or press feature.

One of my employees’ wives called me out of the blue. She said, “I just wanted to thank you. What you’ve built at Blinc changed our lives — my husband’s happier, more present, and it’s changed how we are as a family.”

I cried for fifteen minutes after that call.

That’s when I realized impact isn’t always measurable in dollars. Sometimes, it’s in the people you help see themselves differently. That’s what I want MayThe5th to do, help leaders and teams rediscover clarity, discipline, and joy in their work.

For me, success used to mean growth, valuation, social status. Now, it means helping a founder sleep better at night because their systems finally work or helping a regulator draft a policy that actually improves safety instead of creating red tape.

Turning Strategy into Execution

If I have one obsession, it’s execution.

Too often, consultants sell strategy and walk away before the hard part begins. I’ve lived through the consequences of that and built MayThe5th to bridge the gap.

One of my favorite examples was a client project involving a custom device with razor-thin margins. Material costs had skyrocketed, and we were losing 30% of units due to defects in water transfer printing, a process that’s expensive, slow, and wasteful.

By rethinking the finish entirely and shifting to heat transfer, we reduced the defect rate from 30% to under 3%, cut costs dramatically, and improved sustainability. The margin target was hit not by squeezing suppliers or raising prices, but by redesigning the process.

That’s what Precision. Strategy. Execution. really means:

Define the problem, find the leverage point, and move fast without cutting corners.

Founders & Policymakers Often Miss Clarity

When I work with founders, I often see the same blind spot: scaling is not about producing more; it’s about building the capacity to produce more without breaking.

Most executives focus on outputs: sales, units, revenue, but rarely on the inputs that make scale sustainable. I help them see the structure behind growth: redundancies, process mapping, supply chain resilience, compliance frameworks.

And when I work with regulators or government agencies, the issue is similar, but in reverse. They focus on rules before systems.

Standards like ISO, ASTM, and CEN exist to make regulation enforceable and transparent, but they’re often overlooked. I’ve seen firsthand how effective public–private collaboration can be, like the work done by the Science and Policy Committee in Colorado alongside the Marijuana Enforcement Division, where standards directly informed safer, smarter cannabis regulation.

When science, policy, and business align, that’s where progress happens.

The Balance Between Speed and Rigor

Every founder struggles with this: how do you move fast without breaking things?

For me, the answer is small, deliberate change. The butterfly effect of business.

Automate one task. Clarify one workflow. Align one team around a metric that matters. Those little shifts compound. They save time, unlock creativity, and build momentum without sacrificing quality.

That’s the heartbeat of MayThe5th.

I help companies find the small changes that create outsized impact.

Legacy and the Bigger Picture

For my clients, I want MayThe5th to leave clarity. I want them to finish an engagement with measurable wins like higher margins, faster execution, cleaner communication. But also a renewed sense of confidence in their own systems.

For my son, I want pride. Not in a company he’ll inherit, but in the way his father helped others build things that last.

And for the industries I serve, from manufacturing to policy, I want to reintroduce an old idea:

The answers aren’t always in revolution, but in refinement. That progress happens when we stop reacting and start executing with purpose.

At the end of the day, MayThe5th isn’t just a consulting firm. It’s a bridge between what leaders imagine and what they can actually achieve. MayThe5th bridges what others separate — strategy and execution, business and policy, speed and rigor.