Chris learned hockey early, growing up in Montreal where the sport isn’t something you choose so much as something you inherit. Before anything formal, there was a pond near his house. A plastic chair to hold onto. A lot of falling.

“I remember just pushing that chair around the ice,” he said. “You don’t really think about it—you just keep going until it starts to feel normal.”

When his family moved to Atlanta, hockey didn’t come with the same built-in structure. There were rinks, there were leagues, but nothing like the natural pipeline he had started in. So he and his friends took a different approach.

They built one.

“In sixth grade, we started our own team,” Chris explained. “There wasn’t really anything organized at the school level, so we just said, alright—let’s do it.”

That meant tryouts. Scheduling. Finding ice time. Getting people to show up. It wasn’t polished, but it worked. By eighth grade, that same group had turned into a state championship team.

“We got a lot better pretty quickly,” he said. “Once everyone buys in, things start to click.”

High school brought more structure and more visibility. What started as something informal became something the school rallied around—morning announcements, pep rallies, a run to the state finals. They didn’t win that last game, but by then the shift had already happened.

“People actually cared,” Chris said. “That was the coolest part. We introduced something new and it stuck.”

That experience—starting from nothing, figuring it out as you go, building momentum over time—shows up again in his career.

Chris began in recruiting, running a full desk and learning how to build pipelines from scratch. From there, he moved into software, helping grow a Salesforce partner by building out both talent and business development functions. Each step required the same core instinct: understand the system, then help it evolve.

“You’re never walking into something perfect,” he said. “There’s always something to figure out.”

Now at Rocket Partners, that mindset applies to a different kind of environment. Client systems are rarely clean. They’re layered, interconnected, and often shaped by years of incremental decisions.

The work isn’t about replacing everything. It’s about understanding what’s there and building forward from it.

“In hockey, you don’t wait for ideal conditions,” Chris said. “You play with what you’ve got and adjust.”

That approach carries. Whether it’s a new team, a new role, or a complex system, the process stays consistent—learn it, test it, improve it.

And if it doesn’t exist yet, build it.