About
StrawbTOPS isn't a firm. It's me — Christopher. Ten years of building systems, fixing operations, and working inside businesses across more industries than most consultants have visited.
Why This Exists
Late in my corporate career, an outside firm spent a year and a million dollars at the company I worked for. They resolved a handful of simple issues and made things measurably worse in others.
I knew exactly what needed to be done. I'd already validated the approach using my own accounts with the same software. Nobody in a position to act on it took me seriously.
A colleague put it plainly: “If your title said consultant, they'd be paying you for this.” So I made my title consultant. I build everything myself. I don't farm work out to 1099s. That's a large part of why my engagement roster stays small — the work that leaves here is mine.
The Path Here
My first exposure to operations was as a general warehouse worker at a chemical manufacturing company in Atlanta. Inventory audits, shipping and receiving, industrial chemical waste treatment — manual labor alongside the warehouse team. Everything ran on paper. Before I left for a better-paying opportunity, I documented every process I owned so there'd be no gap when I was gone. I didn't think much of it at the time. Looking back, it was the beginning of a pattern.
I joined as an entry-level team member and made team lead within six months. Six months after that, department manager. Six months after that, I was managing two departments — a team that had grown from 11 to over 60 people under my oversight. I taught myself Excel during the slow season while everyone else went home early. The spreadsheets I built to manage my teams ended up getting pushed company-wide. I built a versioning system for them so updates could be distributed without breaking existing data — additive only, like a schema migration. I was being tracked for upper management when I left to start my first company.
After winding down my first business I returned to the chemical plant. I took on lab responsibilities — running titrations, monitoring pH levels and chemical composition to stay within city compliance thresholds. The owner noticed and offered me the regional sales manager role when the previous one retired. I spent two years traveling the circuit with my team and two and a half years managing remotely. The close friendship I had with the owner made me want to see the business succeed. Watching it stay stuck on paper systems — knowing exactly what could be fixed and how — was its own kind of education.
I'd been working on my own cars for years. When I left the chemical plant — partly because the travel was ramping back up and I'd just met the woman I was going to marry — I started a mobile automotive service company. I ran it for two years. It was during that time that something I'd always intuitively known became explicit: the process of diagnosing and fixing a broken engine and the process of diagnosing and fixing a broken workflow are fundamentally the same. Identify the symptom. Trace it to the cause. Fix the cause, not the symptom. Don't touch what isn't broken.
After exiting the automotive business I went back to corporate to decompress. I worked in support at a clinical research software company — built a dated, versioned Loom video library so the whole team could send pre-made how-to guides instead of writing the same answers from scratch. Then moved to a healthcare CRM company managing Stripe accounts across the U.S. and internationally, automating billing workflows in HubSpot, and presenting cross-sell opportunity frameworks based on usage data. That's where the consulting firm showed up. That's where StrawbTOPS started making sense.
The Name
The “Strawb” is personal. My wife loves strawberries. When I proposed to her, my gift was a commissioned oil painting of that moment — me, proposing to her, in a strawberry field. StrawbTOPS is something I'm building for both of us. It felt right to carry something that personal into it.
“TOPS” stands for Tera Operations Per Second — a unit of computational performance. The technical half of the name. Together they're an honest summary of how I work: equal parts human and technical. I don't think you can do this well without both.
What that means in practice:
I build everything myself. No work gets farmed out.
I care whether the solution works for your team, not just technically
I'm direct about what makes sense and what doesn't for your situation
I've run businesses. I know what it costs when operations are broken.
Clean handoff is always the goal. I don't pad engagements.
I'm selective about who I work with. A small roster means every client gets real hours and focused attention.
The conversation is free. What's it costing you not to have it?
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