About George

The Whole Story

1. After Graduation

   No Plan, No Safety Net

   I graduated with no job lined up. For two years I drifted — part-time work, what they’d call gig work today, no health insurance, no clear direction. I was almost homeless. That’s not a talking point. That’s what happened.

2. Air Force

   Meteorologist

   The Air Force gave me structure when I had none. I served at weather stations doing 24-hour shift work — forecasting in a shop that never closed. Like a fire station or an ER — always on, peaks and lulls, but the mission doesn’t stop because the clock says five o’clock.

   I also had the opportunity to work in an assignment that combined that real-time operations tempo with a think tank environment — analyzing problems, making plans for the future, figuring out how to get things done when there’s no rulebook but the mission still has to be solved. That’s where I learned that a large bureaucratic organization can also be nimble — if you know who to talk to and how to work behind the scenes without breaking any rules.

   In my final years I started putting down roots — investing in real estate, making commitments, building something for the first time.

3. The Lost Decade

   Promising Starts, Dead Ends

   The end of the Cold War meant Congress drastically cut the size of the military. I’d been planning on making it a career, but just shy of ten years, I found myself on the street. With no income and real estate investments threatening to drown me, what followed was a decade of trying to find something that stuck. I used the GI Bill. I taught a year of 7th grade science in Tampa — and swore I’d never teach again. I worked in sales. I was an office manager. I ran a delivery service for a year. I tried to get in early on the new World Wide Web. I worked as a curriculum designer.

   Every one of those was a promising start that turned into a dead end. Not because I wasn’t working hard — I was working constantly. If you’ve ever spent years doing everything right and still not getting traction, that was my thirties.

4. 2000 — Caregiver

   My Father Passed. My Mother Needed Me.

   In 2000, my father passed away and I moved in with my mother in Northern Virginia. She was still quite active around the house but needed someone to take her to appointments, to shop for her. That meant I could still go out and get a job. But we were in yet another recession — so once again I was applying everywhere and nobody was returning my calls.

5. Teaching

   11 Years of High School Math

   Drawing dead on all my options, I thought about trying teaching again — but high school this time. Maybe the kids would be calmer. And math instead of science. Less messy. It turned out teaching wasn’t the problem that year in Tampa — that first year is one of the hardest years anyone can have.

   Eighty-hour weeks. But it felt good in a way nothing else had — I was empowering kids to use their critical thinking skills as they transitioned to adulthood. Giving them a framework, not just formulas.

6. Full-Time Caregiver

   Mom

   My mother’s health declined to where she needed 24-hour care. I quit teaching. Caregiving for a parent is unusually hard because we’re fighting a losing battle and we know it. I’m fortunate — my mom had a physical disability, but her mind was sharp to the end. I once met a couple who were taking care of their dad who had dementia. We both understood we’d drawn a short stick — but I knew mine was longer.

7. After Mom

   Picking Myself Up

   After her passing, my own health had severely declined alongside hers. That’s what happens with long-term caregiving — we pour everything into someone else and there’s nothing left. I needed time to put myself back together.

8. Small Business

   Cricket Wireless Stores

   I opened Cricket Wireless stores here in Florida — with locations in the rural parts of the district as well as Gainesville. It was a good opportunity for me, for the people I’d be hiring, and for the customers we’d serve. Years of saving, investing, and living within my means gave me a backstop — and that backstop is what made the leap possible.

   Everything I’d learned came together: the military’s behind-the-scenes problem-solving, the teacher’s instinct to empower people, and now a firsthand understanding of how all segments of this district work and overlap — rural and urban, struggling and thriving, all shopping at the same counter.

   Then COVID hit. It was a hard blow, but I thought I could still make it. Then 2023 started and the economy began to slow. I had to make the painful decision to exit the business. It’s the feeling you get staring at the river with most of your money in the pot, realizing you’re drawing dead. You fold — not because you want to, but because you have to protect what’s left so you can still play a hand in the future.

Where the Ideas Come From

If you look at my resume the polished way, it reads: veteran, teacher, entrepreneur. Sounds like a plan. It wasn’t. It was a series of reinventions because the path kept disappearing.

Every recession meant starting over. Not just a setback — a reset. The career we’d built on is gone, and we’re reinventing ourselves in a completely new field, starting from the bottom, including with our paycheck. And while we’re rebuilding, we’re burning through our savings, our retirement, our cushion for the future — just to get by now.

And even when a recession didn’t take my job, it still took something. In 2008, I was teaching. I felt blessed to have work when others were losing theirs. But my pay was frozen from that point until I left teaching. Since my retirement is based on my final years of salary, that freeze permanently lowered it. Every month is a reminder that even the people who kept their jobs aren’t completely made whole.

But here’s what I’ve learned: every time a chapter ends, we have a choice. We can look for someone to blame. Or we can try to understand the bigger picture — what actually went wrong, what went right, what the system is doing that nobody’s talking about.

Everyone in Florida 3 over 40 has a version of the same story. The job that was supposed to last. The industry that moved. The pension that became a 401k that became “figure it out yourself.”

Everyone under 30 has the future tense of the same fear.

Because of my setbacks, I never achieved the top of any one field. But at the same time, my ability to pivot into something new meant I was never stuck somewhere I couldn’t recover from. Some people did better than me. Others did worse. But each time I got knocked down and picked myself back up in a different field, in a different part of the country, sometimes overseas — I could see the common thread. The same patterns kept showing up: different industries, different decades, different zip codes, same extraction, same ratchet, same people paying the price.

I may not be the perfect person for this job. But I might be enough of a Swiss Army knife to understand which tools in the arsenal will get the job done — while taking into account how it affects the people who aren’t in the room when the decision gets made.

Why Congress

I’m not running because I have all the answers. I’m running because I’ve spent my whole career navigating a world where the old answers stopped working — and Florida 3 has everything it needs to build new ones.

Florida 3 doesn’t need someone who goes to Washington to yell on cable news. It needs someone who understands what we have and does the work of connecting it.

If this resonates, help make it real (opens in new window).