Why I Started Full Throttle Marine (And Why It Took This Long)

Some things take a long time to become obvious. This one took about 25 years.

I’ve spent most of my career in technology — enterprise software, cloud platforms, data analytics, AI. I’ve worked at Fortune 8 companies and scrappy startups. I’ve led teams through compliance frameworks, infrastructure modernizations, and platform launches. By most measures, I’ve had a successful run in the tech world.

But there’s always been another version of me running in the background. The one who grew up near the water in Northeast Florida. The one with a mechanical engineering degree who actually loves machines — not as a credential, but as a passion. The one who spent years coaching youth athletics and leading mission trips, not for career reasons, but because watching someone accomplish something they never thought possible is one of the best feelings in the world.

Full Throttle Marine is what happens when all of those threads finally pull together.

The Idea That Wouldn’t Die

In 1999 — right out of FSU — I tried my hand at entrepreneurship for the first time during the DotCom heyday. The timing was wrong. Life had other plans. But the itch to build something never went away.

In 2021, I finally gave it a real outlet. I built Here2Fish, a peer-to-peer boating and fishing platform that I’d been sketching in my head since 2001. An idea that had been sitting on the shelf for 20 years finally had a legal entity, a website, and a shot. That same year, my family made a bold move — trading North Texas for Key Largo, where we fished on our 2020 NauticStar Defiantly nearly every day for two years. That boat’s name was not an accident.

By 2023, we landed in Palmetto on Florida’s west coast. Tampa Bay. Home. And Here2Fish grew into something bigger — a family of platforms and tools that eventually pointed toward the same conclusion: the marine industry is full of demand and short on professionals who take the work seriously.

Shop Class

In the fall of 2025, I taught shop class.

My boys are homeschooled. My son John and I spent a semester on a real project: a 1999 Mercury 90 ELPTO outboard on the back of a 1989 Ranger bass boat. The goal was to get it from 28 miles per hour to 40. Simple goal. Not a simple path.

Before it was over we’d done a full carburetor rebuild, replaced the fuel line and primer bulb, swapped out the trim motor assembly, raised the engine height on the transom, and tested two different propellers back-to-back with data to guide the decision. The final result was 41.6 MPH — a 48.6% improvement over where we started. John didn’t learn that from a YouTube video. He learned it in the driveway, with grease on his hands.

Every time I walked through that process, I kept thinking: this is exactly what’s missing. Not shop class specifically — but the idea that young people can learn real skills, build real confidence, and produce real outcomes without spending four years and a hundred thousand dollars to do it.

That thought didn’t leave me alone.

The Room Where Everything Connected

In November 2025, I attended a conference in Marco Island. An economist named Ron Hetrick from Lightcast stood up and laid out the state of the American labor market in a way I haven’t been able to stop thinking about since.

The picture was this: too many graduates chasing jobs that don’t require their degrees, while the skilled trades face an accelerating shortage with no pipeline of workers coming behind them. He cited the stat that 44% of US graduates are finishing with degrees in Business or Finance while effectively zero percent of job postings list those degrees as a hard requirement.

I watched a senior leader from a prestigious Big 10 university stand up and ask what they should be telling their graduating students. There wasn’t a clean answer.

I sat in that room and felt something click.

I’m a mechanical engineer. I’ve spent decades investing in young people — on athletic fields, in youth groups, in the driveway teaching my kid to rebuild a carburetor. I live in one of the most boat-dense states in the country — 1.1 million registered boats in Florida alone. Ron Hetrick wasn’t telling me something I didn’t already know in my gut. He was handing me the data to confirm it.

The trades need people. Young people need a path that doesn’t start with debt. The marine industry needs a premium operator who takes the craft seriously. And I had spent my entire career — in tech, in startups, in enterprise transformation — building the exact combination of skills to do something about all three at once.

That’s when Full Throttle Marine became real.

What We’re Actually Building

Full Throttle Marine is a premium mobile marine service company based in Tampa Bay. We operate on flat-rate pricing, photo reports, and a seven-step service experience that customers can count on. We don’t compete on being the cheapest. We compete on doing the work right, every time.

But the bigger vision is what we’re calling the Next Wave program — a structured pathway for young people between 18 and 24 to enter the marine trades, own a business in a protected territory, and build real net worth. For less than the cost of one year of in-state college tuition.

My long-time friend and business partner David Webb is anchoring the St. Augustine and First Coast market. He brings 20 years of business and leadership experience and was the first person to look at this thing and say he was in. That matters more than it might sound. When someone you trust completely bets on the thing you’ve been building — that changes the energy.

We’re now looking for a few more.

Why I’m Writing This Here

I don’t usually cross streams between my tech world and my personal ventures. But this one is too connected to everything I’ve written about on this blog to keep separate.

Everything I know about building systems, training teams, creating operational frameworks, and competing on quality came from the same place that Full Throttle Marine is being built from. The work isn’t different. The domain is.

If any of this resonates — as a prospective operator, a parent, or someone who simply knows the right person — the conversation starts at ftmarine.com. The full founding story is there too, if you want the longer version.

We’re building something real. And we’re just getting started.

Questions or thoughts? Reach out here or connect on LinkedIn.