The longer version.

The short read

I'm a Korean-American operator from Orange County. Sixteen years of multi-unit, multi-state operating discipline across hospitality, franchise retail, distribution, and digital growth. Nineteen years of mission-driven service running in parallel underneath the corporate work. Trilingual. Builder of an independent ops and AI consulting practice. As of January 2026, I serve as Director of Development & Communication at a Bay Area faith-based youth nonprofit, anonymized here as Bay Area Youth Foundation. Targeting VP, Head of Operations, and COO conversations at multi-unit, franchise, restaurant-tech-adjacent, or founder-led operating companies. Based in San Mateo. Available within thirty days.

The longer read is below.

Media bio (copy-paste ready)

Kiyong (Eric) Lee is a multi-state operations executive with sixteen years scaling restaurant, hospitality, retail, and franchise businesses. He has owned a $36M P&L across 21 franchise units in six states, led the operational reset at a Michelin-recognized Bay Area hospitality group, and currently serves as Director of Development & Communication at a Bay Area faith-based youth nonprofit. He lives in San Mateo, writes about operating discipline at kiyonglee.com, and is trilingual in English, Korean, and Spanish.

The origin

My first case study in operational excellence wasn't a boardroom. It was my parents' cleaning business in Orange County. Six in the morning to six at night. Six days a week. They didn't just clean houses across Irvine and the surrounding cities. They built the most trusted name in the category, one customer at a time, over years.

Watching them taught me three things before I had language for any of them. Reputation is a multi-year compounding asset. Quality control is a process, not a value statement. The work that's invisible to the customer is what makes the work the customer sees feel effortless.

I didn't know I was learning operations. I thought I was just helping out. By the time I started working my own shifts, I had already internalized something most operators don't pick up until much later in their careers: that the floor is the source of truth, that systems work when nobody has to be a hero, and that grit without architecture just produces burnout.

The education

I hold a Bachelor of Arts from Yonsei University and a Master of Divinity from Korea University. The combination is unusual for an operations executive, and it has shaped how I approach the work in ways most resumes wouldn't capture.

Yonsei is where I learned the structure of argument and the discipline of writing under deadline. The undergraduate work was about how to think across cultures — the academic frame was Korean-Western comparative, the operating frame turned out to be Korean-American business. The skill that has carried across to every operating role since: the ability to translate the same operating thesis into the vocabulary the room actually uses.

Korea University and the M.Div were where I learned to work with text, doctrine, and pastoral judgment over long arcs. Five years of theological study sounds adjacent to the operating career. It's actually upstream of it. The discipline of careful reading, the weight of standing behind a teaching commitment, the habits of accountability across a multi-year program — all of that ports directly into the operating method. The work that compounds in any setting depends on the same architecture. The vocabulary is different. The discipline is the same.

On top of the formal degrees, the executive certificates: Wharton Digital Marketing Certificate Program (four-course program, completed December 2020). Harvard Business School Online Certificate of Specialization in Leadership & Management (three modules: Management Essentials, Leadership Principles, Negotiation Mastery, completed September 2021). Lean Six Sigma Black Belt through the Council for Six Sigma Certification (issued September 2025). ServSafe Food Protection Manager, Instructor, and Proctor through the National Restaurant Association (valid through June 2028).

The credentials matter because they're verifiable. The verifiable PDFs sit at credentials for anyone who wants to confirm.

The languages

Trilingual operations is not the lead pitch. But it matters quietly in three settings. Multi-state operations in California with significant Spanish-speaking line staff — the operating cadence runs better when the operations lead can switch into Spanish on the floor without a translator. Korean-American community work — the congregation, the ministry track, and the donor relationships at Anchor Point all ran partly in Korean. Cross-cultural negotiations — vendors, host-environment partners, regulatory bodies — sometimes benefit from the operator being able to read the room in a second language.

The operating chronology

The full chronology of corporate operating work lives in the lessons section on the homepage as the patterns the engagements taught, and in the full story page as the longer narrative. The summary table below names the major engagements without re-telling the story.

The volunteer thread

Running underneath the sixteen years of corporate operating work has been a nineteen-year track of mission-driven service. Five organizations from 2007 to the present. The volunteer work peaked with twelve years of fundraising at Anchor Point Ministries: a $1.2M capital campaign for a new church property, $300K every six months in recurring mission funding for college-campus outreach, and a congregation tithing rate north of 90 percent against an industry typical of 10 to 25 percent. As of January 2026, the thread converted into a paid Director role: Director of Development & Communication at Bay Area Youth Foundation (the anonymization for the real client).

I never thought of the volunteer work as separate from the operating work. The discipline is the same. The vocabulary is different. The full chronology of the mission-driven track lives at community.

What I read, who I learn from

The operators I read most carefully are the ones who actually shipped before they wrote. Andy Grove on high-output management. Edwards Deming on system variance. Jim Collins on flywheel work. Patrick Lencioni on the operating cadence of leadership teams. Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha on careers as scalable portfolios. Donella Meadows on systems thinking. The McKinsey Quarterly archive for the post-mortem framing it occasionally produces.

On the operator-builder side: Patrick Collison's writing, Naval Ravikant's catalog, the Stripe Press publishing track, the Patrick O'Shaughnessy podcast for the longitudinal operator interviews. On the AI-as-infrastructure side: Anthropic's publishing, Simon Willison's blog, the LangChain ecosystem, the operator-flavored AI work that Cursor, Linear, and Notion ship.

The pattern I look for in any of them: thinking that survives contact with reality. The writing I trust is the writing that comes from people who have shipped first and theorized second.

What I'm working toward

The next chapter is a VP-level operating role at a multi-unit, franchise, restaurant-tech-adjacent, or founder-led operating company that needs the operating method applied at a larger scale than I've run before. The platform that's already been built — sixteen years of operating depth, the eighteen-year donor stewardship track underneath it, the independent AI-forward consulting practice, the published operating prompts other operators use — gets to do its compounding work in a single seat with a single mandate.

San Francisco Bay Area. Hybrid or remote. Earliest start: thirty days. Conversations open at eric@seod.com.

What people get wrong about me

Two things, sometimes. That the breadth is dilution. The corporate operating record, the volunteer thread, the consulting practice, the eleven ventures — read as scatter to some recruiters who haven't seen multi-engagement operators before. The pattern underneath is consistent: the operating method is the same architecture deployed against different problems. Hospitality, distribution, digital, mission-driven nonprofit. The vocabulary changes. The work doesn't.

That the technical fluency means I'm a tech-person, not an operating person. The terminal aesthetic on this site, the AI consulting practice, the dashboards I build — these read as engineering signals to people who haven't seen modern operators close-up. I am operationally first. I happen to be tech-fluent, which lets me deploy AI as operating infrastructure rather than as a side experiment. The two aren't in tension. They reinforce each other.

What I'd want you to know

The operating method I describe across this site isn't a framework I learned in a class. It came from sixteen years of taking responsibility for portfolios that depended on heroics and rebuilding them into systems that compound without me. The thread connecting every chapter is the same instinct that came from watching my parents run quality control on a cleaning business in Irvine. Show up. Engineer the details. Let the work speak when no one is watching.

The site is the working version of the operating thesis. The conversation is where it gets put to the next test.