What am I looking for?

My ideal environment would be:

• Team based: Since I value good communication and respect, I enjoy working with a team that feels the same. I enjoy being able to individually contribute, but since I have better-than-average situational awareness, I often find myself able to think critically about how my role fits into the grand scheme of business operations. Being positioned in a team that encourages my input would allow me to have the greatest impact.

• Somewhere I can learn: My last role was twelve years long across four companies, and it focused on proprietary SAAS tools. Because of this, I see a lot of toys in the marketplace that I haven't had a chance to learn and play with yet. My ideal environment would encourage me to learn and grow with tools new to me.

• Somewhere with growth potential: I really enjoy teaching others. In my last role, I redesigned the reporting analyst onboarding program and reduced onboarding time from six months to six weeks. While I'm not expecting to start a new job with direct reports, I would ideally have an opportunity soon to mentor others and, later, a chance to have direct reports.

• Somewhere I can innovate: When I began my last role, I interviewed client managers in the first week and discovered an opportunity to help that no one had thought of. The result: an automated SQL process that performed statistical analysis on business segment performance from the previous day and identified possible issues. This reduced reaction time from one week (at the time there were only weekly reports) to one day. "Invaluable" was a term that was used a lot when the client managers described it as it saved incalculable amounts of lost revenue from outages. I thrive where I can make changes to processes that help in ways big and small.

• Remote first: My family has one car to keep costs down and minimize our effect on the environment. We've made it work, especially since working remote full time since 2020, and I am fully capable of doing an amazing job remotely.

All that said, I do understand the value of being flexible, and I'm willing to discuss the role you're looking to fill to see how we can make it work.

Okay, but what's with this website?

Great question! I'm a total nerd and one of my favorite hobbies is playing D&D with friends and family. DadsRollDice is my TikTok handle and that's where I share useful information on how to make gaming easy and safe for kids, and where I share stories from my home game. This website was spawned from that account and where I started my Angel NPCs project where people can tell me about lost pets or family members and I turn them into characters that anyone can include in their D&D game, letting their legacy live on.

Funnily enough, since I run our D&D campaign, I don't "play" as much as I "manage" it.

"What does that mean?" Glad you asked, because it's a lot:

1. Gathering requirements: What does everyone want to experience at the table? What are everyone’s boundaries about what they definitely do not want to experience? What kind of world am I comfortable designing and running? Is everyone ready to play the same system?

2. Planning: I’ve got a table with five players, that means five individual backstories that I weave together into a fictional world I’ve created in a way that is seamless, believable, gives each player a chance to achieve what they want to experience, and advances the plot, my "bottom line". I’m responsible for detailed analysis on the environments the story takes place in, the people and creatures the players will encounter and understanding the fictional world steady state.

3. Improvisation: Very little is pre-planned, the game takes place in the moment which means understanding how each encounter in the game fits within the overall world. I voice all of the characters in the story that are not my players and have to remember their motivations, secrets, personalities, descriptions, names, and (shudder) accents and characteristics. When the dice we use do unexpected things, I’m responsible for determining what those things are and how they affect the flow of the story, all while keeping it entertaining for my players.

4. Mapping: Each player is an organization unto themselves with strengths, weaknesses, motivations, and limits. I consider all those things when establishing plot hooks, encounters (think “scenes” in a TV show or movie), McGuffins, etc. Everyone at my table needs to feel they have an opportunity to shine and show off their character.

5. Scheduling: Have you tried getting six people together for a weekly meeting about something that isn’t first, second, or even third priority?

6. Meeting management: Three of my players are remote, two are in the room with me. I manage the flow of gameplay while half of those in attendance have a time delay. I’m responsible for the majority of technical setup, I’m responsible for ALL the visual elements (maps, character tokens, reference images).

7. Quantitative and qualitative analytics: Tracking factions, their resources, fictional global economics, stats and metrics of success, all to further inform my executive decisions.

8. Learning from failure: Sometimes I make the wrong call and someone’s character suffers a setback that feels unfair. It is then my responsibility to resolve the situation by introducing elements of luck or advantage to my players in a way that feels natural and fits into the story.

And I do all this for FUN. Imagine what I could do for a paycheck…