What a 1978 Factory Floor Taught Me About Risk
I started in aerospace before I ever set foot in a courtroom or signed a deal. That might surprise people who know me today through aviation finance or mergers and acquisitions work. But in 1978, I was a Production Engineer at Heckman Corporation in Mentor, Ohio, working quality and compliance for suppliers to Sikorsky and Pratt and Whitney. I was 23 years old, a few years out of Hiram College, and I thought I understood what rigor looked like. I did not. Not yet.
What that factory floor taught me, slowly and sometimes uncomfortably, was that risk is not an abstraction. It lives in tolerances measured in thousandths of an inch. It lives in a component that looks fine but isn't. In aerospace supply, you don't get a second chance to discover that a part failed after it should have been caught in quality review. That reality shaped something in me that law school later refined but never replaced. The habit of checking one more time. Of asking whether the data actually supports what the eye is seeing.
When I went to the University of Akron School of Law and eventually tried cases, I carried that mindset with me. Trial work at its core is risk management. You are constantly evaluating what you know, what you can prove, and what might collapse on you in front of a jury. Earning the American College of Trial Lawyers Medal for Excellence in Advocacy meant a great deal to me, but what I remember most from those years is learning to be honest with myself about where the weak points in an argument were. That discipline started in a factory, not a lecture hall.
Here's where I think I got something wrong in my earlier years, though. I used to believe that being thorough was the same as being cautious. I conflated the two. If I had gathered enough information, I thought I had managed the risk. What I understand now, after 45 years across aerospace, law, mediation, and eventually transactions like the VAS/Satair deal in 2022, is that thoroughness reduces uncertainty but does not eliminate it. At some point you have to make a decision with imperfect data and live with it. The executives I've seen fail were often not the ones who acted too quickly. They were the ones who kept gathering information past the point where it was still useful, afraid to commit.
That shift in thinking still matters to me because I see the same trap everywhere. In a complex acquisition, there is always one more due diligence item, one more financial model to run. I'm not arguing for carelessness. My approach has always been to identify the issues clearly, define the desired result, and then evaluate each risk one by one without over-thinking. But knowing when to stop analyzing and start deciding is a skill. It took me longer to develop than I'd like to admit.
The other thing that 1978 gave me, and this took decades to fully appreciate, was respect for operational people. When I moved into strategy and finance, it would have been easy to treat the shop floor as something separate from the deal table. I never could. I knew what it was like to track a component through production, to sign off on a quality inspection, to understand that a supplier's problem is your problem. That knowledge made me a more honest negotiator and, I think, a more trustworthy one. It's hard to misrepresent what you actually understand.
My thinking has grown less certain over the years, not more. I have fewer definitive answers than I did at 25. But I'm a better listener now, and I'm more comfortable saying that a situation is genuinely complex rather than forcing a clean explanation onto it. If a deal or a problem can't be explained simply, that's a signal worth paying attention to. Complexity increases risk. Risk, unacknowledged, leads to bad decisions. I learned the beginning of that lesson at a manufacturing facility in northeastern Ohio, and I've been refining it ever since. I expect I'll be refining it until there's no more work left to do.