“I've always wanted to know why things work — and how to make them work better.”
Hi, my name is Matt. I'm here to help.
Growing up in LA's South Bay, I was always the kid who wanted to understand how things actually worked. Not just on the surface, but at a deeper level. What's broken, why, and how do you fix it for good? That instinct never left me. It just found a new domain: the messy, human complexity of organizations.
At the RAND Corporation, I spent nearly a decade as a policy analyst working on problems that didn't come with ready-made solutions. When our team needed to process large volumes of unstructured text, I built the NLP frameworks to do it. When federal clients needed workforce data systems that didn't exist, I designed them. The technical skills I bring to consulting today weren't planned. They were earned because the problems I cared about demanded them.
That same drive led me to start SDC Vantage. After years of watching organizations struggle with the gap between their people strategy and their people reality, I kept seeing how much clarity the right data and framing could unlock. I started SDC Vantage because I believed there was a better way to serve growing organizations, and I wanted to build it.
What I believe about people at work.
“Employees are not resources to be managed. They are collaborators to be understood.”
The organizations I most want to work with share a core conviction: that culture is not a poster on the wall. It is modeled by leaders in every interaction, shaped by systems and incentives, and felt by every person on the team. When culture and strategy are misaligned, no amount of operational excellence closes the gap.
I believe work can and should be more than a paycheck. When people find genuine alignment between their own values, growth, and purpose with the organization they're part of, the result is not just a better place to work. It's a more resilient, more innovative, and more competitive organization.
That alignment doesn't happen by accident. It requires data, intentionality, and a willingness to hear difficult truths. My job is to surface those truths clearly, and to help you act on them.
The background behind the work.
Before founding SDC Vantage, I spent nearly a decade at The RAND Corporation, one of the world's most respected research institutions, conducting workforce analysis, organizational assessments, and policy research for some of the most demanding clients in existence: the Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. Air Force, the U.S. Space Force, and federal justice and education agencies.
My academic training is in Industrial-Organizational Psychology (the scientific study of human behavior at work), complemented by a graduate certificate in Six Sigma Innovation and Design. I bring both the theoretical foundation and the practical toolkit to diagnose organizational challenges with precision and recommend solutions that actually stick.
M.S. Industrial-Organizational Psychology | University of Idaho
Graduate Certificate, Six Sigma Innovation & Design | University of Idaho