Michael Pratt

Background

About Michael Pratt

I was labeled the lazy kid in grade school. I would see a task, or a problem, especially if it was a repetitive one, and I would always say “there HAS to be a better way to do this”. In school I would have a task, like math, that required a lot of calculations and written work… and I would find a shortcut (one of the mental shortcuts I found is now a part of the common core learning method). This led to teachers calling me lazy… One job I had ALMOST fired me, I was hired for data entry… the same tedious task over and over again. When I saw what was to be done, I was literally like “WTF? There is definitely a better way to do this”. I was there a couple of days when the boss came to check up on progress and was REALLY pissed when I hadn’t done a single entry yet. I was able to convince him to give me a couple more days. I turned a 60ish hour job every week, into about 30 minutes of work… He got a promotion. Some people might still consider this lazy, I see it as efficiency and getting a better outcome for less. I worked for a very short time for an eCommerce company that built their own platform… They had endless problems with user management and payment gateway integrations… Something that EVERY single other existing platform had mastered. Why not just build an extension for an existing platform, so you aren’t starting from complete scratch? This was not a popular opinion with the developers though… When I was eComm administration for SwervePoint, they hired me when I insisted that there was a better way to maintain their eCommerce platform. I didn’t know what it was yet, but I knew their had to be. Within 6 months I had gotten their eComm platform running smoothly and caught up on all tasks updates and changes. Now that I had some free time I asked to sit in on ERP migration meetings with the consultants, since they were saying a project that had already taken 1 year, was going to take another year and a half. When I hear all of the complications with the data, I again insisted, to the chagrin of the consultants, that there HAD to be a better way than they were proposing getting the data out of and into the new system. I figured out a way to subvert their system and get the data over into the new one. It took 6 months to go live. I was immediately promoted to Director of IT. I think my strongest asset is the ability to take many complex problems and systems into consideration and find, create and implement the best and most efficient possible solution.