My Story: The Short Version
Pittsburgh native
I grew up in Mount Washington and have spent most of my life in Pittsburgh. I went to Canevin High School and then Duquesne University, where I studied accounting and played tight end until an injury ended my football career.
Duquesne has remained an important part of my life. I've had the opportunity to work with students, support the university, and stay connected to many of the relationships I built there long after graduating.
After college, I became a CPA and spent roughly a decade in accounting and finance. I started in audit at Ernst & Young, working with companies ranging from Fortune 500 businesses to small startups, before moving into finance transformation consulting at Grant Thornton. The work gave me a broad view of how businesses operate and had me traveling nearly 70% of the time, but Pittsburgh was always home.
Today, it still is. My wife, Kelsey, and I are raising our three kids, Blake, Cooper, and Ashton, here. I've built my companies here, invested in this market, and continue to believe there is a tremendous amount of opportunity in Pittsburgh.
The turning point
In 2018, I took a significant pay cut to become CFO of a local Pittsburgh real estate company. It was my first real exposure to the industry, and I spent about ten months restructuring the company's back office.
Then I was fired.
I had just gotten married and had spent ten years building expertise that I didn't want to put back on a corporate résumé. I told Kelsey I needed six months to figure something out.
I started doing bookkeeping for real estate agents for $20 an hour. In May 2019, I put together the capital for my first deal: a $40,000 single-family home in Allentown, Pittsburgh.
What came next
That first property became the beginning of CityLife Residential. From there, I built a lending company after seeing good Pittsburgh investors get rejected by lenders who didn't understand the neighborhoods they were investing in. I built Accruity after repeatedly meeting business owners making major decisions with financial information they couldn't trust. Provato grew from the same pattern: identifying a problem and building a better solution.
What connects the businesses isn't simply real estate. It's disciplined capital structuring. I'm interested in where money goes, why it goes there, how it gets managed, and what happens when the original plan changes.
What I've learned
Numbers tell you what happened. They don't tell you what will happen.
I learned that by operating. I built a wholesale real estate division to $1.2M in its first year, then shut it down 18 months later when it became clear it wasn't the business I wanted to run. I don't consider that a failure. If you weren't wiped out, you didn't lose. It's just a lesson.
That experience reinforced something I still believe: discipline matters more than momentum. Knowing when to keep going matters. Knowing when to walk away matters, too.
Still building
I'm still building and investing in Pittsburgh.
My companies have grown well beyond that first $40,000 property, but the basic approach hasn't changed. I look for problems worth solving, opportunities where I have an edge, and ways to put capital to work responsibly.
My mission is simple, I do everything I do to drive toward the three things below.