Profile
Paul Reeves
If you've found your way here, you're probably trying to figure out who I am — maybe you're a hiring manager, maybe a future colleague, maybe someone I'm about to meet across a table. Rather than make you piece it together from a résumé, let me just tell you.
I've spent a little over two decades running operations — fleets, transportation, parking, and the budgets, teams, and systems that hold them together. I like the kind of work that is measured in real numbers and lands on someone's Monday. I've learned that the best questions almost always come from inside the work rather than above it, and that a leader's job is to keep asking the one everyone else has stopped asking.
I'm at a genuine inflection point. After twelve years building and leading the fleet and business operations at a major research university, I'm looking for the next place to put that experience to work — ideally somewhere close to home in the greater Atlanta area, or anywhere at all if the work can be done remotely. I'm open about being in that search, because I'd rather have an honest conversation than a coy one.
What I bring is straightforward: I run things well, I manage money and people carefully, I'm honest about what the data does and doesn't say, and I'm curious enough to keep learning — lately, how AI and machine learning actually hold up inside real institutions. If any of that is useful to you, I'd genuinely like to hear from you.
— Paul
The short version
I'm an operations and business-management leader with more than fifteen years of progressive experience directing fleet, parking, and business operations for a major research university and a national services firm. I've managed multimillion-dollar budgets and assets, led teams of up to 65, rolled out enterprise technology, and delivered measurable cost savings and revenue growth. My strengths sit at the intersection of P&L management, strategic planning, process improvement, data analytics, and the vendor and stakeholder relationships that make any of it possible.
What I've been doing
For the past twelve years I've led fleet and business operations at Emory University. As Assistant Director, I direct strategic management of a 585-vehicle fleet across five Georgia locations — roughly $7M in assets on a $2M annual operating budget. The results I'm proudest of are the quiet, compounding kind: cutting total fleet cost-per-mile nearly in half, right-sizing the fleet from 664 vehicles to 585 to lower carrying costs, and deploying the information and telematics systems that made the whole operation legible for the first time. Before that, as Manager of Business Operations, I built the in-house strategic fleet program from research up and reported the financial performance of parking, transportation, and fleet to university leadership.
Earlier, running campus parking for Standard Parking, I managed daily operations across 14 facilities and 13,000 spaces with a team of 65, and led the work that more than doubled annual visitor parking revenue over two years — through pricing strategy, disciplined loss prevention, and rigorous daily financial control, not by adding a single space. It's where I learned that the revenue in an operation is usually hiding in plain sight, waiting for someone to ask the right question.
Before parking and fleet, I managed all the operational functions — payroll, budgeting, IT, HR — of a nonprofit, and ran a $1.75M corporate-accounts portfolio at Six Flags Over Georgia. Different industries, same throughline: take responsibility for how something runs, measure it honestly, and make it better.
What I'm exploring
The InquisitiveCynic — this site — is where the operations experience meets what comes next: a practitioner's study of how applied AI and machine learning actually perform inside institutional operations. Not the hype, the practice. It's the same discipline I've always brought to a telematics feed or a maintenance invoice, pointed at a new set of tools. If you'd like to see how I think, the Field Notes are the best window.
Career at a glance
Away from work
I'm married with three children, and most of my time outside the office is spent at their sporting events and school performances. I've served as president of our high school's lacrosse booster club and spent years on humanitarian mission trips with Honduras Outreach International. The through-line there is the same one that shows up at work: I like showing up for people and making things run.