I write about the intersection of traditional commerce and digital systems, testing new tools where the code meets the gavel.
My perspective is built on more than three decades of active operations, beginning in 1992 at my grandfather’s estate auction. That day still sits under everything that followed.
Today, as Partner and Chief Marketing & Technology Officer at Grafe Auction Company, I help run a national platform conducting nearly 290 commercial and industrial online auctions a year across all 48 states. High volume. Real transactions. Digital theories get proven or discarded fast.
Before Grafe, I spent sixteen years as Vice President of Operations and Auctioneer at Schultz Auctioneers Landmark Realty. During those same years I also worked as a law clerk for a solo attorney in small-town Minnesota. Parallel tracks. That clerk work still shapes how I write, think with others, and represent a voice larger than my own (Shared Thinking, One Voice).
I care about the next generation of practitioners. I served as the 76th President of the National Auction Association (2024–2025) and as Board Chair (2025–2026), including executive transition and long-term institutional decisions for the association. I am a Lead Instructor for the Auction Marketing Management (AMM) program and develop the artificial intelligence curriculum for the Certified Auctioneers Institute (CAI) at Indiana University. Previously, I served as the 60th President of the Minnesota State Auctioneers Association and as founding President of the Minnesota State Auctioneer’s Foundation.
Peers have marked that path with the Pat Massart Leadership Award, the National Auction Association President’s Award of Distinction, and the Golden Gavel Award from the Minnesota State Auctioneers Association. The titles end. The work is what stays.
I live in Grand Meadow, Minnesota, with my wife Billie Jo and our daughter Anna Claire.
What I Write About
Leadership in small, high-trust organizations gets tested when the path is muddled and the decisions will not earn applause. I write about showing up in those seasons, building systems that outlast heroics, and caring more about getting it right than being right.
Most leadership failures live in the gap between understanding something and actually doing it. I write about that gap: turning ideas into daily habits under real volume, not cleaner theory.
Technology multiplies judgment. It does not replace it. I write about putting AI and digital tools into traditional auction work so the admin gets lighter and the human calls still matter.
Honesty is not decoration. In high-stakes rooms, plain truth builds trust faster than polished messaging. I write about saying the hard thing cleanly and staying human while you do it.
Useful ideas rarely stay in one lane. History, literature, and a week of auctions often rhyme. I follow those patterns when they explain how people and markets actually behave.
The most honest teaching happens when you are still figuring it out. Proximity is a credential. The person one step ahead in the fog often teaches better than the expert far above the weather.
Every piece of writing on this site begins as a handwritten thought card, a brief, index-card-sized observation jotted down after conversations, books, or days spent on the road. Some of these remain as raw thought cards. Others grow and merge into essays when unexpected connections emerge. When several cards begin to circle the same theme, I compile them into concepts, which serve as living, evolving overviews tracing how an idea develops across different sources and over time.
Start here
If you are new to the site, these pieces carry the main threads:
- If an AI Can’t Find Your Auctions, Neither Can the Buyers - when machines do the discovering, readable inventory is the market
- How I Actually Use AI - vault, skills, and a morning loop that has to hold under real auction volume
- The Person-System Trap - when the operator is the system, and what technology does to that
- The Watchman Principle - accountable for the warning, not for whether anyone listens
- The Full Circle Isn’t the Ignition - how I became able to teach is not why I still do; the fuel is the room
- Shared Thinking, One Voice - co-think, fuse research, represent client, members, brand
For talks and CE sessions, see Speaking.