It started with running tapes. Literally. I was a runner at a TV station in Berlin in the late nineties — the elevators were unreliable, and when content arrived that needed to go on air three minutes later, you paid a young guy to sprint up the staircases between the master control room and the sports division on the fourth floor. That was me. I did not mind. I was inside the building, and I was watching everything.

From there I taught myself into the MCR. Not running it — operating it. Running into things I had no idea how to do and figuring them out by doing them. Satellite transmissions. Live conferences over bundled ISDN lines. The kind of work where the uplink window is fixed and there is no version two. Then a different TV studio, where I sat in every seat I could find — audio desk, live switching, graphics, camera shading, teleprompter, VTR. Not because anyone told me to. Because I needed to understand how it all connected.

The moment that changed how my brain works permanently was a signal flow diagram on the wall of the equipment room at a TV station in the Sony Center, Berlin — around 2001. Every signal. Every path. Every DA, every converter, every destination. Drawn out, clear, complete. For a visual thinker, it was like someone handed me the map I had always been building in my head. I stood there and overlaid everything I already knew onto that drawing. That is how I learned to think about systems — visually, end to end, no gaps. That instinct has never left me.

After the studios, I moved into event production at a rental house in the early 2000s. Building fly-pack systems from single components for exhibitions, gala dinners, corporate events. The work looked different every time: you show up with a truck full of parts, you build a functioning system for that event, and then when it ends, you break it all back down into individual boxes and pack it away. Like it never happened. And then you do it again, somewhere else, for something different. The constant rebuilding forced you to re-trace signal flow from scratch every single time. Where is it coming from, where is it going, what happens in the middle. Those are the rules. I have never stopped asking those questions.

That same era taught me something that I carried into everything that came after. In the events world I was doing everything — building the fly-pack, running the system, and whenever I could, cutting the show. Acting as TD while also being the systems person. One day a Director pulled me off the switcher mid-show and brought in someone whose entire skill was cutting. It was a punch in the face. My ego took the hit.

Sitting with it, I understood something that changed how I worked: being good at systems is not the same as being good at cutting. A real TD reads the room before the camera does — thinking three shots ahead, feeling the rhythm of a show the way a conductor feels an orchestra. That is a different brain. Not better or worse. Different. I was not that brain. I was the systems brain. From that moment, I stopped trying to be both. When someone asked me to cut, I said: I’m not good at that. You want someone else. I’m good at the systems. And something unexpected happened — they trusted me more. Saying what you are not is the most credible thing you can say in a room full of people pretending to be everything.

I am not a 2110 specialist — and I want to be honest about that. I can sit in a room and have a real conversation about whether IP infrastructure is the right path: the need, the cost, the risk, the timing. I have led the people who build those networks. But I am not the person you bring in to architect the solution. What I am is the person who knows enough to ask the right questions — and to know whether the person answering them actually does.

I came into concert touring having already settled who I was: the systems person, not the TD. That understanding was the foundation, not something I found along the way. In the touring world the Director and TD are usually the same person — broadcast separates them, touring rarely does. Which meant my role was clear from the start: be the technical partner. When a director wanted to do something interesting on the switcher, they came to me. We worked out how to technically achieve what they were imagining. Translating artistic vision into a signal flow solution in real time — that was the work I was built for, and I loved it.

I started working with PRG in the UK around 2011 as a subcontractor — still freelance, building the relationship show by show. I moved to the US in 2014, and it was 2016 before I joined full-time, eventually taking on the role of Director of Engineering leading the touring division. The shows included the Rolling Stones’ 50th Anniversary Tour — my first time with the Stones, which turned into two and a half years of working with them. There was Paul McCartney, which happened the way touring always does: I was in Australia with the Stones when Mick Jagger’s wife passed away, the tour was cancelled, we flew back on the band plane to London, and three days later I was on a flight to Chicago to help prep McCartney. Within a week I was in South America for a leg of his tour. One thing leads to another, faster than the police allows.

My role was never to be just the touring engineer on the road every night. I was the person who planned the video infrastructure of the show — making sure every piece of equipment needed to execute that video production existed, communicated, and worked. Every signal flow guaranteed before the crew left for the first city. That included the crew itself: understanding who knows what, who works well together, who you trust when the stakes are high. At peak we had over 1,600 freelancers working across PRG’s touring operations — a pipeline I could never manage alone, but the inner circle of key people on the flagship shows, I knew every one of them.

One project from that period I am particularly proud of: the INGEST system. A multi-channel capture system for 3G-SDI input that captured in real time, converted to ProRes 422, and pushed finished ISO recordings to an external NAS via 10GbE — all finished and exported within twenty seconds of show end. What normally took a full day of exporting camera by camera, file by file. We built versions of that system for U2 and for a Beyoncé show in South Africa in 2019 where we had 27 simultaneous 3G inputs ingesting and converting, feeding a Premiere Pro edit suite on-site to re-cut the show for broadcast while it was still happening. Going into that day I genuinely did not know if it would work. It did. That was a good feeling.

The pandemic stopped everything. Tours cancelled. Furloughed. And somewhere in that silence, I made a decision: I was not going to try to be two things anymore. I had spent years being a great systems engineer who also led. I wanted to be a great leader who also understood systems. Those are not the same thing, and the difference matters.

PRG called. They needed someone to lead their corporate live streaming operation — the part of the business still running while everything else was shut down. I said yes, but I was honest about the terms: This is not my technical expertise. If we all agree that I don’t need to be the clever guy in the room — if I can lead the team without touching the gear — I’ll take the role. They agreed. And it worked.

Diversified was the company I had been buying equipment through for years — a vendor relationship that had quietly become something built on real trust. They brought me in to lead: first media entertainment on the West Coast, then media entertainment across North America, then media and AV across North America, Canada, and India. A steady growth, maybe fast — I am not sure it felt fast at the time because the challenges were always there, and the challenges were always the people. Not as a problem. As the thing that made it interesting, and made it a genuinely wonderful place to work.

I have no degree. Everything I know, I learned by doing — by sitting in the seat, making the mistake, and deciding what to take from it. The runner carrying tapes up four flights of stairs taught me to stay close to the work. The signal flow diagram on the wall in Berlin taught me to think visually and completely. The TD moment taught me that honesty about your limitations is more valuable than pretending they do not exist. The PRG return taught me that you can walk into a room, say I won’t be the clever guy, and still be exactly what the room needs.

What I noticed moving from live production into the systems integration world was this: the egos that live comfortably in live production do not have the same home in integration. Engineers working in that world are too deeply aware of the complexity — the margins are smaller, the stakes are higher, the interdependencies are greater — to spend much energy pointing out other people’s flaws. What you find instead are people working very hard to earn their place, and doing it with their heart in the right spot.

That holds wherever you go. In any engineering environment, in any country, at any level — the people doing the work tend to be among the most kind-hearted and hard-working people you will ever meet. That has been true every time, without exception. It is the part of this career I am most grateful for.