From a very early age I was involved in my family's business in aerospace manufacturing. Growing up I watched as my father managed our company through the lean years, when sharp economic downturns would nearly cause our business to grind to a halt, through to those wonderful years of plenty, when so much work would come through our doors it felt as if it were quite literally raining down on us.

My childhood also included frequent trips around New England to visit other manufacturers who had not been so fortunate as to have my father's foresight or his fastidiousness; they had gone bankrupt and we were there to buy their machinery, put it back to work, and help keep the people in our communities employed. 

It seemed that all too often these boom and bust cycles would spell doom for our fellow American family-owned small businesses, and with every cycle we saw fewer and fewer of the many friends I had come to know over the years able to stay in the industry that their fathers and grandfathers had pioneered.

Over a decade later, while pursuing a fast paced career in the mortgage industry, I was fortunate enough to learn from one of the top performing real estate teams in the nation the tactics and sales strategies they had used to not only survive but thrive during the Global Financial Crisis. At a time when the real estate markets were in full meltdown and their competitors were exiting the business, they had managed to not only maintain their profitability but also increase their market share.  It didn't take me long to realize that these same strategies could have the same applications in manufacturing; and thus the idea for Stratus was born.