Tekdec, Inc. was founded in 2001 — not as a grand business strategy, but as a vehicle for consulting work that ran alongside a full-time career. It has never been the primary income source. It has always been the long game. This is the story of what built it, what almost ended it, and what it's becoming.

Before the Keyboard

I graduated high school in 1982. In 1983 I started college, and in 1984 I worked with one of the first mini-computers used for CAD — a machine larger than a six-foot desk, which puts the term "mini" in historical perspective. Three years of mechanical drawing and architectural drafting in high school had already built a foundation in spatial and technical thinking before I touched a computer. Then life intervened, college stopped, and the path redirected for the first of many times.

The years between college and tech school were physical. Nearly four years in the trucking industry — parts delivery and supervising a brake shop for semi trucks, primarily Freightliner and Volvo/White. Running a shop in my early twenties meant managing up to two direct reports, parts inventory, and schedules simultaneously. After trucking came construction — general laborer, carpenter, roofer. Then retail management at 7-Eleven — no direct reports, but full operational responsibility for the store: sales, customer service, stocking, ordering, and keeping things running. Then the jobs that blur together when you're young and figuring out what you're actually good at.

Hearing loss that had gone unaddressed since early childhood made some of those customer-facing roles harder than they needed to be. I had attended twelve schools across five states before graduating high school — starting over every year or two, new classroom, new social dynamics, hearing profile that made every new environment harder to navigate. That kind of repeated displacement builds a specific kind of adaptability. Not the professional kind discussed in leadership seminars, but the kind that develops when you have no choice. Assess the environment. Find what matters. Get functional as fast as possible. That pattern ran on repeat through childhood and became the operating mode for everything that followed.

Every chapter of those early years — drafting, physical labor, shop management — involved either technical precision, keeping systems running under pressure, or managing people who did both. The skills were consistent even when the industries weren't.

Tech School and CBIS: May 1989

In October 1988 I enrolled in a tech school program in micro-computer applications. DOS-based systems, pre-GUI — this was before Windows made computing accessible to people who didn't want to understand what was underneath it. Learning computing before graphical interfaces existed means you understood what a computer was actually doing before software started hiding it. I completed the program in May 1989 and started at CBIS on May 15th of that year.

At CBIS I ran high-speed, high-volume mail machine inserters — Bell & Howell Imperial 10000 and Pitney Bowes 7000 equipment — processing millions of billing statements monthly. Within six months I was promoted to shift supervisor. For the next four and a half years I ran 30 to 35 employees per shift, sometimes covering two shifts simultaneously. Billing accuracy went from 92% to 98%. Rework and missed SLAs dropped by 75%. That's not a data entry job — that's high-volume production management with real accountability metrics, and I was doing it in my mid to late twenties.

Sprint: March 1994 to August 2005

I joined Sprint in March 1994, starting again in mail operations for about 18 months before moving into high-speed bill printing — IBM and OCÉ equipment, mounting reel-to-reel data tapes and cartridge tapes for the programming department before robotics made that role obsolete. Watching that transition happen from the inside was an early lesson in how technology eliminates roles and creates others. Understanding what the tape was for made you more valuable than simply knowing how to mount it.

In March 1997 I transitioned into COBOL/mainframe programming — no computer science degree, no formal training in the language. I learned it on the job, supporting a billing system for 22 million customers across seven states. IBM OS/390 and z/OS, JCL, IMS, DB2. The full enterprise computing stack of the era. The transition wasn't random — Sprint was consolidating data centers in late 1996 and mine was leaving Central Florida. The choice was relocate to Dallas or find another path. I went to the software development department manager and asked to be taken on. At the same time a friend in real estate suggested getting licensed as another income hedge. Both paid off simultaneously — COBOL programmer by day, real estate agent building a parallel career. That instinct to pursue multiple paths when circumstances force a decision has characterized every chapter since.

The last four years I was on the ABEND/Recovery team — on-call 24/7 with a 12-hour SLA to diagnose and fix production failures. An ABEND in that environment didn't mean a slow website. It meant a billing system for millions of customers was down or producing incorrect output, and the clock was running from the moment it failed. That kind of pressure teaches you to think clearly under stress, read code you didn't write, find the problem fast, and care about production stability in a way that's hard to simulate anywhere else.

Y2K was the capstone of that era. The industry-wide effort to remediate date-dependent code before January 1, 2000. Our team achieved 98% conversion accuracy — among the highest in the industry. Unglamorous, methodical, high-stakes work. Sprint laid me off in August 2005.

Eleven years on a production billing system — self-taught, on-call, surviving Y2K — is a foundation that most formal computer science programs don't replicate. There is no substitute for doing real work on systems that cannot fail.

Building Businesses in Parallel: 1997–2013

The career narrative understates what was running alongside it. From 1997 through 2009 I was a licensed real estate agent and broker — twelve years of client management, market knowledge, and commission-based business development running in parallel with full-time W2 employment. From 2003 to 2005 I added mortgage brokerage. I stepped away from mortgages not because of the market but because of what I was seeing in the industry's practices — the blurring of ethical standards and the escalating legal scrutiny that predated the crisis. Real estate brokerage was enough in that environment.

From 1998 to 2001 I operated Computer Options Enterprise, Inc. — my first incorporated business. The name happened to spell COE, which is my last name, so the personal ownership was already embedded in the acronym. In 2001 I closed it deliberately and founded Tekdec, Inc. in its place. "Computer Options Enterprise" was too narrow — it implied a scope limited to computers specifically. Tekdec was constructed to be broader: "tek" for technology, "dec" for my initials. Technology-focused but not technology-constrained. The business that exists today is the one that name was built to support.

From 1999 to 2002 I earned a BS in Business with an emphasis on E-Business from the University of Phoenix — full-time school, full-time work at Sprint, running Tekdec, and working real estate simultaneously. The CS degree I had originally enrolled for had its requirements changed by the state mid-program, which would have required two additional years. I pivoted to Business/E-Business and graduated on schedule in 2002. In 2003 I started Webster University part-time toward an MS in Computer Science while still at Sprint, completing 12 of 24 credits before the August 2005 layoff ended the program.

From 2005 to 2007 I purchased distressed properties, rehabilitated them, and either sold them or held them as rentals — three residential rental properties at peak. The last purchase was a decision I own. I was seeing signs of market softening but made the buy anyway. Nobody predicted a 65% decline as fast as it came, but the warning signs were there and I chose to proceed. The 2007-2008 housing crisis didn't just collapse commission income — the cascading effects worked through the rental portfolio over the following years, and by 2013 those properties were gone. Real estate brokerage wound down by 2009. The crisis hit on multiple fronts simultaneously, and the recovery from it has been the financial backdrop for everything since. I never declared bankruptcy. Every outstanding debt from that period was paid off personally, the last of them in 2022. It was a long haul. The stubbornness that made that possible is the same stubbornness that kept Tekdec going through all of it.

The real estate and property businesses didn't fail because the model was wrong — they failed because the market ceased to exist. Tekdec didn't fail because the foundation was different: skills with durable demand regardless of interest rates or housing prices. Knowing the difference between those two kinds of failure is useful when you're deciding what to build next.

Entering Defense: January 8, 2007

I started at GDIT on January 8, 2007 — not as a calculated career move, but out of necessity. The real estate and mortgage businesses were failing, I had a family to support and obligations that don't pause while a market recovers. The entry point was a network connection from my real estate business — a colleague who was a program manager at GDIT and needed someone who could translate engineer speak and write documentation that met contractual requirements. He knew my background. He made the call. That's how most significant career transitions actually happen.

The role was broader than "technical writer" implies. Defense documentation under MIL-STD-38784 and later MIL-STD-40051 covers the full project lifecycle — technical manuals, training materials, and the complete range of CDRL deliverables: engineering documentation, program management documentation, test documentation, and everything in between. Beyond documentation I built server racks, configured networks and firewalls, installed video systems and radio systems, and contributed to the technical solutions needed to build the training systems themselves. And I trained soldiers and technicians on those systems — standing in front of a classroom of Army personnel or Marine Corps technicians and making sure they could actually operate and maintain what we built.

The systems spanned the full LVC domain — Live, Virtual, and Constructive:

That last category — aviation flight simulators for FMS — is the direct thread to my current role. The systems I was building and documenting in those early GDIT years are the same category of system I now manage as government acquisition on behalf of partner nations.

The next thirteen years covered more ground than most careers:

The transition from technical writer to program manager wasn't planned — it was earned. When you can read engineering documentation, write about it clearly, manage the process of producing it, and understand the contract requirements it fulfills, you're already doing program management work. The title catches up eventually.

There was one window where Tekdec consulting came close to becoming something more. GDIT laid me off on June 30, 2016. From July through December of that year, Tekdec operated as a 1099 systems engineer consultant to Riptide Software — six months of independent consulting income that showed what the business could generate when the market was there. The income was good. The proof of concept was real. But I was still in reactive mode from the layoff, and if I'm honest, still carrying the weight of the financial losses from 2008 to 2013. The confidence to extend the consulting practice and build on that momentum wasn't there. When Riptide offered a W2 role with a significantly higher salary than GDIT had paid and better benefits, I took it. The rational choice given where I was. But there are readers who will recognize that moment — the window that was there, and the reasons, practical and psychological, that you didn't step through it. The current Tekdec effort is different: built from stability rather than necessity, with products rather than pure consulting, and with enough distance from those earlier losses to trust the foundation.

Waterfall to Agile: Both Sides of the Table

I started my career as a programmer in a purely waterfall environment. Requirements were handed down, you coded to them, you moved on. Managing software development teams in defense contracting — particularly the SAVT program — required implementing and operating in hybrid Agile environments. The shift from waterfall coder to Agile program manager is not just a methodology change. It's a fundamentally different relationship between requirements, execution, and feedback.

Understanding both models from lived experience on both sides — developer being managed and manager directing developers — is rarer than either one alone. That dual perspective informs how Tekdec approaches both product development and consulting engagements.

U.S. Army Civilian: June 2023

On June 20, 2023 — the day after Juneteenth — I started as Assistant Program Manager (Acquisition) at CPE ST3, the Capability Program Executive for Simulation, Training, Test and Threat, formerly known as PEO STRI (Program Executive Office for Simulation, Training, and Instrumentation), the name most people in the defense training systems space will recognize. I lead the International Aviation Virtual IPT, managing an active $121M portfolio of Foreign Military Sales programs across CH-47F, AH-64E, and UH-60M aviation simulation platforms for EUCOM and CENTCOM partner nations, including sustainment of 31 flight and maintenance simulators.

The portfolio includes programs I can speak to concretely: directing the joint acquisition of CH-47F and UH-60M Flight Training Devices for a CENTCOM partner nation; managing the first-of-its-kind AH-64Ev6 medium fidelity FTD for a EUCOM partner nation — a system that interconnects with existing Longbow Crew Trainers on a single case and contract; and a sustainment case covering 31 simulators for a separate EUCOM partner. A Bell 412 part-task cockpit trainer for a SOUTHCOM partner nation was delivered last year, closing a case that had been in the portfolio since earlier in my tenure.

This is my fourth employer in the defense industry. No move was calculated — each one was a response to circumstances and an opportunity to do work I was already equipped to do. I believe in the mission. I plan to retire from defense work, and retirement may still include defense-related consulting. That part isn't going anywhere. The current role has no direct reports — it is cross-functional matrixed leadership, coordinating across engineering, contracting, logistics, and foreign military sales disciplines toward program outcomes.

FMS program management is a specific discipline that most people outside government acquisition haven't encountered — managing procurement on behalf of a foreign partner nation through the full lifecycle from pre-LOR through contract award and sustainment. The complexity is significant and the practitioners are a relatively small community. That expertise is available through Tekdec.

Building at 62

What is changing is the breadth. Tekdec exists to cover all of my interests — not just the defense-adjacent ones. The product direction reflects 45 years of problems I've actually lived with. TAP — Team Availability Portal — came from a defense program management problem but is built for any team that needs visibility into availability across concurrent work. A personal finance tool because I've managed my own finances in Excel for over 20 years and know exactly what a purpose-built tool needs to do differently. A reading tracker — Codex of Everything, which carries the COE initials forward deliberately — because I've been an avid reader since age 12 and no existing tool handles the Universe/Series/Book hierarchy that serious reading history requires. A MIL-STD documentation toolkit because I've spent 13 years building expertise that defense contractors need and can't easily find.

The business philosophy is honest: if one of these generates significant income, that's where more attention goes. That's not today. Today is about building things that are worth building, making them available, and letting the market tell me what it values. The retirement runway is real and the motivation behind it is real. The goal is income that doesn't require trading time for money indefinitely — built from expertise that took 45 years to accumulate and isn't going anywhere.

Forty-five years across trucking, construction, data centers, mainframe programming, real estate, defense documentation, systems engineering, program management, and foreign military sales doesn't produce a traditional career narrative. It produces someone who can operate in environments most specialists can't, build things most managers won't, and explain things most engineers won't bother to. Many of the pivots along the way were forced by circumstances. Some of the failures were mine to own. Both are part of what Tekdec is built on.