Work

ICS Automated is a control systems integrator, engineering firm, and electrical contractor in Greenville, SC. We started operating jointly in January 2026 with no outside money. It's owned by its employees, and every owner is a licensed PE. The goal is simple to say and hard to do: be the integrator water and wastewater utilities in South Carolina actually want to call, then grow that across the Southeast.

Day to day I'm the HMI and networking guy. I migrate legacy HMIs (InTouch, Lookout, WinCC, iFIX) to VTScada and Ignition, build alarm notification systems operators trust, design plant networks with real segmentation, and keep the OT side of the house backed up and defensible. I still pull wire when it needs pulling.

The part of the job I'm best at is the call that starts with "it just stopped working." Radio links that drop at 2 a.m., an alarm that fires with nothing wrong, a PLC that talks to everything but the HMI. I'm good at asking the questions that turn a mystery into a short list of things we can test, in order, until one of them is the answer. I haven't met a challenge I wasn't willing to figure out, as long as it can be done safely. I'm big on safety.

Somebody once told me "if you're doing something new in engineering, you're probably doing it wrong," and there's a lot of truth in that. Water plants run on proven stuff for a reason. But I also think we're supposed to be innovative and adapt. New technology is a tool that should make us better at the work (and I use plenty of it). It's not supposed to be a crutch that keeps us from understanding what we're doing. If you can't explain why the loop is stable, the fancy tool didn't help you.

I didn't set out to run a company. I'm an engineer who watched private equity buy up the integrators I'd worked for and saw an opening: utilities wanted the people who actually did the work, not a sales team that came with them. Figuring out where my competitors were falling short was the easy part. Registering with the local tax office, buying insurance, and learning all the business stuff I'd never had to care about was not. That became Infinity Control Systems, my own LLC, and then a partnership with Joel to form ICS Automated. Most of what I know about running a business I learned the same way I learn everything else: by having to.

Before ICS I was an Automation Specialist at CDM Smith, the Regional HMI Application Manager at Inframark, and spent five and a half years at MR Systems, where an internship turned into my first engineering job.