About Refine

Refine started in 2010. While talking with several friends who own and operate small businesses, I noticed an overlap in what they needed and what I knew how to do.

I was traveling for the FAA, championing a new safety culture and guiding culture change. Many of the issues I have seen in my Aviation Safety Career have stemmed from Human Factors, and we were trying to institute systems to work with cognitive failings to increase safety.  As I discussed certain advances in cognitive science with my friends who owned small businesses, I noticed that they were dealing with similar problems.

While unconscious biases might not cause a small business owner to crash an aircraft, it does lead to loss of profit, poor customer satisfaction, and eventually the crash of the business.  This is one of the reasons 97% of business fail in the first 10 years.

The other reason is a lack of well designed systems.  Demming’s concept of managing the system instead of the people is the reason for Toyota’s success, and has since been proven in every industry.  As a Lean Six Sigma Blackbelt, I have designed, assessed and adjusted systems for several different industries.  As a small business, the cost of getting to Six Sigma (3.4 defects per million opportunities (DPMO)) is probably prohibitive.  But Imagine going from 2 sigma (308,537 DPMO) to 3 sigma (66,807 DPMO) that’s almost 242,000 more happy customers!!!