When Greg first got in contact with Crescent Solutions’ senior recruiting partner, Ricky Grandy, he was looking to move out of Utah, and Ricky helped place him at a financial software company in San Diego.
“My dad was in the Navy in San Diego and said if you had the choice of where to go, definitely go to San Diego,” Greg said.
Greg had the interview on a Thursday and was asked by the company to move to the West Coast over the weekend to start working on the following Monday with what he said was an “awesome pay rate.” Now on his second stint with Crescent Solutions, he’s working at a college and is referred to by his colleagues as the “NetApp Guy,” and says he loves the company and the people he works with. In his time there, he is working on migrations and has already figured out a way to save the company $25,000 a month in fees that rack filers were taking up.
“Greg is one of the nicest people I’ve ever met and he’s even willing to take his Volkswagen off-roading to show someone a good time,” said Ricky.
Ricky was referring to the day Greg went with his friends to Holy Jim Falls in Trabuco Canyon, California, driving through back roads. His car hit a bump and it punctured a hole in his oil pan, right when they were in the middle of nowhere. Stranded, Greg called Ricky—one of the only people he knew close by—for help. Ricky came by to pick up Greg and his friends.
This moment is just one of the chapters of Greg’s intriguing life. When he turned 16 during the time he lived in his hometown Massachusetts, his father gave him $3,000 to start a business. He used that money to open a store selling role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons, grossing $50,000 a year. He dropped out of high school—not because he didn’t do well, but because he had lost interest when he was “raking in the money,” he said, from the store’s earnings. Greg earned his GED before his classmates even graduated high school. While he had his shop, he started building his own computers, and eventually had a network of them and charged customers by the hour to play the video game Duke Nukem. This was his entry-point in his career in technology, eventually landing him a job at NetApp, and he opened a web-hosting company in 1999—which he shut down last year. He’s also attended nursing school in the past before he became a systems administrator at a company in Utah, and was a wedding and prom DJ on the side.
When Greg isn’t working, he tries to stay away from computers since he’s on them all day long. He enjoys hiking, cooking, bikram yoga, soccer, and boogie boarding.