Twenty years inside IBM — eventually as Client Technical Leader for some of the largest banks in the country. Patents on the wall. Then I left, started a company, and have spent the past decade running real operations of my own. Both halves matter. Each one keeps the other honest.
Michael Reddock · Bentonville
I joined IBM as a young engineer and never quite left. I ended up as Client Technical Leader on some of the bank’s largest accounts — Citigroup, State Street, Navy Federal — managing infrastructure strategy across teams of hundreds of engineers.
Along the way I filed patents on systems-level work, watched the industry move from mainframes to cloud to GenAI in real time, and learned the most important thing an enterprise tech veteran ever learns: a beautiful architecture that doesn’t survive contact with a real operator is just a slideshow.
By 2023 I’d had enough of the slideshow.
I left IBM in 2023 to find out whether the systems I’d been recommending to my clients could actually hold up under my own roof.Most of them couldn’t. So I built new ones.
Today I run a multi-property hospitality operation across several states — hotels, short-term rentals, a few buildings that bring in real revenue and demand real attention. Teams in Nepal and the Philippines who run the desks and the inboxes. A P&L that doesn’t care how the enterprise software vendor pitched it.
I built my own operating stack because nothing off-the-shelf could survive a 3 a.m. check-in dispute, a flooded room in Round Rock, and a payroll question from Kathmandu in the same morning. Webhook pipelines. Claude in the loop. Dashboards I actually read on Saturday morning, not slideshows nobody opens.
That stack — and the lessons of building it — is what I bring to & tndym. Not theory. Not vendor decks. Systems that have already had to hold a real business together.
I will not recommend a system I haven’t run inside my own operations. If a tool, vendor, or pattern can’t survive my P&L, you won’t hear me recommend it for yours.
Half the engagements I take end with me writing “don’t build this.” A spreadsheet is sometimes the answer. So is doing nothing. The product is honesty, not delivery.
Every engagement is scoped to a fixed fee with a written deliverable. No hourly creep, no surprise change orders, no scope you didn’t sign for.
You hire me. You get me. If we need a specialist, I bring someone I have worked with for years — and you meet them before they touch your business.