About Us

In 1987 I transferred to the Coast Guard Reserve to return to college — and quickly scored an internship at a local computer repair shop. Apple IIs, IBMs, early Macs. I was in my element. In 1988 I transferred into the Massachusetts Air National Guard as a crypto tech, and around the same time my mother asked me to help a few of her colleagues with their computer problems. That was the beginning of Giotronics. I was repairing computers, running early network technologies — ArcNet, Token Ring, coaxial Ethernet — and discovering that helping people solve technology problems gave me something that felt like purpose.

The Air Guard sent me to Sniffer and Advanced Sniffer training for packet analysis and named me network security manager for Barnes ANG Base in Westfield. As NCOIC of Small Computer Maintenance, my team of eight maintained 400+ endpoints and six servers — including a migration from Banyan Vines to Windows NT 4.0 — while keeping the network secure. The fundamentals of security I had learned in the Coast Guard never changed. Only the platform did.

In January 2000, a distracted driver rear-ended me and changed the trajectory of everything. Two neck surgeries and lifelong challenges with my lower back eventually led to a medical discharge from the Air Guard — where I had been working toward my Master Sergeant (E-7) rank. I had lost a stripe in the transfer from the Coast Guard years earlier and had earned it back. That path closed. But a different one opened.

In 2001, I closed Giotronics and went to work for my largest client — Berkshire Industries — as their sole IT manager. Roughly 100 endpoints, 5 servers, no support team. A Novell shop. We rewired the entire facility, built a distributed network structure with multiple data closets and wireless links between buildings, and I got a deep education in industrial control systems through genuine trial by fire.

Then someone handed me a pile of folders and told me to prepare the company for a Sarbanes-Oxley compliance audit. This was before the internet was much use for compliance research. I read white papers and government publications until my eyes bled — and then kept reading. We passed the audit. Nearly six months of my life went into those compliance specifications while I was still managing every day-to-day technology fire that came through the door. That experience built something I've carried ever since — a deep respect for what real compliance work actually demands, and a real understanding of what it costs when it isn't done right.

By late 2004 I was burned out. One man. No support. No vacation. Recently a single father. I left Berkshire and spent a year figuring out what came next. In 2005, NetWerks was born — with a simple premise. I would work for myself, serve businesses rather than a single employer, and build the kind of IT practice I had always wanted to work with rather than for. I cherry-picked the clients I had been supporting outside of Berkshire for years. Some of those relationships started in 1991. They're still intact today.

In 2011 we became a true managed services provider — RMM, PSA, centrally managed security. In 2018 we became NetWerks Strategic Services, LLC, to reflect the depth of what we were actually delivering. During COVID, with more time than usual on our hands, we dove deeper into cybersecurity and compliance training — and made both pillars of the practice rather than afterthoughts. Not because it was a market opportunity. Because the businesses we served needed it and deserved it.

All things happen for a reason. The accident that ended my military career gave me the time and motivation to go deeper in corporate IT, to prioritize what I actually wanted from my work, and eventually to build something I'm proud of. The through-line from the Coast Guard to today is the same one it has always been: I like helping people. It gives me purpose.