Meet Chris Woods
I started my career cutting steel in a die shop for $8 an hour. After that I was a carpenter with the Carpenters' Union, doing commercial construction across Massachusetts. Then I built flutes — machining sterling silver and 14-karat gold at Nagahara Flutes as their first employee.
Somewhere along the way, I taught myself to code. By the mid-'90s I was installing ISDN lines and web servers for architecture firms, selling CAD workstations, and eventually building online project management software for the building industry.
Then the dot-com crash hit. I spent seven years doing whatever it took to keep the lights on — tech consulting, delivering for a dental lab, whatever paid. In 2006, I took a position at Liberty Mutual and spent the next 20 years building enterprise systems for one of the largest commercial insurers in the country. I went from sysadmin to Principal Software Engineer.
Now I'm back where I started — bringing technology to the people who build things. The difference is I've got 35 years of experience and the most powerful tools the industry has ever seen.
Why the trades
I've worked in machine shops, on construction sites, and in architecture firms. I know what it's like to chase a quote at 6 AM, deal with a supplier who can't get their paperwork straight, or lose half a day to a scheduling mess that a computer should have caught.
Most technology consultants have never held a hammer. I have. That means I understand your problems before you finish explaining them — and I won't waste your time with solutions that don't fit how your business actually works.
How I work
No slide decks. No six-month discovery phases. I show up, learn your operation, find the bottlenecks, and build systems that fix them. If your process is a mess, I'll say so plainly — then hand you a working system that replaces it.
I spent 20 years building enterprise systems where security wasn't optional — it was the foundation. That mindset comes with me. Every system I build keeps your data where it belongs, limits access to only the people who need it, and doesn't send your business information somewhere it shouldn't be.
You work directly with me, not a junior associate learning on your dime. If I can't help you, I'll tell you that too. Life's too short for engagements that don't produce results.