Thirty years as a craftsman shaping surfaces, product lines, and production processes. Now I shape software, automated workflows, and operations.
I grew up disciplined by wrestling, sixteen years of it, the kind of sport where nobody else can take your turn. Then came fine art and design school, theatrical sets, and thirty years in manufacturing. Flooring, furniture, product design, CNC programming, construction, operations. More than five hundred designs of mine have gone to market. Two patents carry my name, machinery that major flooring manufacturers have built their lines around.
A factory floor teaches you something software school doesn't. Every process is a system. Every system has waste in it. And the person who has lived in it day in and day out, from raw material to loading dock, has a unique advantage that allows them to diagnose the problem and fix it.
That's what I do now, with different materials. I sit with an owner, walk the operation the way I used to walk a floor, find where the hours and the money leak, and build the tool that stops it. Software finally got flexible enough, and affordable enough, for custom work to make sense at small-business scale. Somebody still has to know what the work actually looks like. That part I've been practicing for thirty years.
The name came from a simple idea: most businesses are not broken. They are just running slightly out of true.
The tool. In woodworking, a plane is a tool used to flatten, smooth, and bring a surface into alignment. It does not replace the material. It reveals what was already there by removing what does not belong.
That idea felt familiar. Most operations are full of capable people, good instincts, and years of hard-earned knowledge. But over time, small inefficiencies build up. Extra steps. Repeated tasks. Scattered information. Decisions that wait too long because the right answer is buried in too many places. The work is there. The value is there. It just needs to be brought back into alignment.
The surface. A plane is also a surface. A defined field. A place where things can be measured, understood, and improved. That meaning shaped the logo: a simple geometric plane, with a line that runs true to the surface. It represents the place where practical work meets better systems. Not theory floating above the business, and not technology forced onto people who never asked for it. The goal is to meet the work where it actually happens, then help it move more clearly.
The perspective. People sometimes talk about a mental plane, a physical plane, or a higher plane of understanding. For us, that does not mean something abstract or mystical. It means seeing the work from a clearer level. Not escaping the details, but seeing how they connect. The uncommon plane is where the owner's vision, the manager's pressure, and the worker's daily friction can finally be seen together. Where scattered tasks become a system. Where repetitive work becomes reusable. Where the business starts operating with more order, more visibility, and less drag.
That is the work of Uncommon Plane: to sit with the real operation, understand what is out of true, and build practical systems that help the business run on a better plane.