Many Hats - Instructor | Software Developer | Entrepreneur

[xlessentials]

Hey Guys,

I'm Jarrod. I studied Industrial Engineering at Texas A&M University. After school, I worked as an Industrial Engineer at American Express, spent four years as a project manager at an engineering firm, and then spent three years as a Business Analytics consultant for IBM - where I worked on projects like the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010, automating financial reporting capabilities for one of the world’s largest investment management companies, and partnering with a leading pharmaceutical company to help evaluate the state of the mental healthcare ecosystem.

I eventually left consulting to get more experience in operations management, which led me to spend two years in a finance management role at a large industrial supply company before I decided to launch my own company. I'm run a company (ReAppDev, Inc) that focuses on three main activities.

Deliver High-Quality, Practical Education Online: In this vertical, I focus on teaching technology related courses that are rooted in real-world application instead of theory. All of my activities here fall under the XLEssentials brand. I launched my first course in May of 2016 (ask me about what this entails!). It focuses on transforming students into Microsoft Excel Wizards. Developing this course was a huge challenge and is one of the things I'm the most proud of in my career to-date.

Provide Software Solutions for Small-to-Medium Sized Businesses: Here I mainly focus on developing software to automate repetitive tasks, digitize paper based processes into online forms with structured data, and migrate offline calculators to the web. I deliver these services through my main company ReAppDev. For the tech folks here, I mostly develop in php with the Laravel framework. Although, I have built a few Java applications and VBA applications for folks who want to automate tasks in Excel, Word, and PowerPoint.

Develop Custom Software: For now, I spend the least amount of time in this vertical. This is where I focus on developing my own software platforms. I'm currently building an Operations Management tool that provides small-to-medium sized businesses more insight into their productivity, utilization of resources, and profitability at a more granular level.

AND...

I think I just set the record for the longest intro. If you read all the way to this point, you're pretty awesome!

Jarrod Tanton
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[David Hunter]

Welcome, Jarrod! I have a cousin who's name is spelled Jared. So many ways to spell it! :-)

[xlessentials]

Yea, I think I have one of the more strange ones. That is, if I order a coffee it always comes back spelled "Jared"

[vangogh]

Welcome to the forum Jarrod. Thanks for the intro. It's always nice when someone spends a little time letting us know who they are and what they've done. I look forward to getting to know you and thanks for joining the community.