Jonathon Ward · Wheatland, Wyoming
I diagnose unreliable systems and make undocumented environments manageable.
I'm Jonathon Ward, a hands-on IT leader, U.S. Army veteran, and the CEO, Co-founder, and Owner of Part on Demand. As Director of IT and Systems Administrator at Western Building Supply, I report to the COO and own infrastructure strategy, vendor and cost decisions, and the IT budget. I'm the published author of Rescue Mission and Lantern.
About
I build things that have to work in the real world: networks and servers that a business depends on, parts that have to fit, tools that people can actually use, and documentation that still makes sense after the person who wrote it has stepped away.
I'm a U.S. Army veteran. I served as a Soldier, PV2, from 2019 to 2020 and received an honorable discharge. During training assignments I maintained accountability and prepared daily morning reports for up to 250 soldiers. I completed all Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear (CBRN) training coursework at Fort Leonard Wood.
After the Army I worked in food-service leadership. In 2020, in Colorado, I was promoted from assistant manager at one Burger King location to float manager, covering multiple stores, often when they were severely understaffed. From June 2020 to August 2021 I was a Field Service Technician under Dell service contracts, covering a territory that extended from Nebraska to New Mexico. I diagnosed hardware faults on site, repaired equipment during the visit when I could, arranged replacement parts when I could not, and trained other technicians, though I did not formally supervise them. Recurring on-site work included Woodward, across three Fort Collins and Loveland locations, and Broadcom in Fort Collins. On additional contract work in the same period I installed Cat6 cabling and performed cable-certification testing with a Fluke Networks DSX-5000 for a Fort Collins hotel, and installed security systems.
I later added customer-facing software support at Vitu in Helena, Montana, where I handled phone, email, and chat technical support for motor-vehicle industry software. I contributed to web development, app development, and social media outreach as Director of Operations Security & Digital Development at Nicecar in Fort Collins, from June 2022 to October 2025. In 2025 I also worked as a Wireless Sales Representative for Russell Cellular (Verizon) in Wheatland, helping customers with device selection, accounts, and connectivity.
In February 2025 I became the CEO, Co-founder, and Owner of Part on Demand, a custom fabrication business I lead and self-fund in Wheatland, Wyoming. I set direction, make business deals, lead outreach and finance, design and reverse-engineer parts, run the shop processes, built the company website, and I'm developing the PoD Hub as a catalog and shop platform for SaaS customers. I also released PODMOD on Cults3D at no cost, as a community contribution. I'm the published author of Rescue Mission and Lantern, available on Amazon.
In August 2025 I became Director of IT and Systems Administrator at Western Building Supply LLC, a manufacturing and distribution company in Wheatland, reporting to the COO. I own day-to-day IT for 27 managed endpoints, including 22 Windows workstations, and I'm leading the design and build of in-house infrastructure to replace an outsourced model of approximately $30,000 per year. I inherited an undocumented environment, mapped it from scratch, wrote a 280-page IT operations manual, and I've supervised one direct report. Alongside paid work, I provide informal IT support for about 20 people, and I've helped more than 50 people, at no charge, identify scams, clean up affected devices, and lock down compromised accounts.
These roles overlap on purpose. Part on Demand and Western Building Supply both run in the present, and earlier work sometimes ran alongside other jobs. That is how the work happened, not a scheduling error.
Feb 2025 – Present
Wheatland, Wyoming. The company I built and still bankroll. Leadership, finance, product design, manufacturing, technology, security, marketing, and customer support — a full operation I run by hand.
Aug 2025 – Present
Wheatland, Wyoming. I report to the COO, own infrastructure strategy, vendor and cost decisions, and the IT budget, and manage day-to-day IT for 27 managed endpoints, including 22 Windows workstations. I have supervised one direct report.
Ongoing
Worldwide, remote. Informal IT support for about 20 people, and unpaid scam-help for more than 50 people.
Jun 2022 – Oct 2025
Fort Collins, Colorado. Web development, app development, and social media outreach, alongside other work in this period.
Mar 2025 – Aug 2025
Wheatland, Wyoming. Helped customers with device selection, accounts, and connectivity. Consistently at least 20 phones sold weekly, with a personal best of 36, plus upsells and approximately three routers sold monthly.
Apr 2022 – Jan 2023
Helena, Montana. Phone, email, and chat technical support for motor-vehicle industry software. Documented cases in a CRM, escalated complex issues, and coordinated follow-up with internal teams.
Jun 2020 – Aug 2021
Regional field service, Nebraska to New Mexico. On-site diagnosis and repair of servers, workstations, and laptops. Recurring service for Woodward and Broadcom. Trained other technicians; did not formally supervise them.
2020
Colorado. Supervised crew, ran shifts, and managed vendors, often at stores that were severely understaffed. Leadership under pressure — not a technical credit.
2019–2020
Honorable discharge. Completed all CBRN training coursework at Fort Leonard Wood. During training assignments, maintained accountability and prepared daily morning reports for up to 250 soldiers.
Certification
Microsoft Office Specialist – Associate, April 12, 2022. Word 2019, PowerPoint 2019, and Outlook 2019.
Education
High School Diploma, Poudre Global Academy.
Windows 10/11, Windows Server, Active Directory, Samba AD, Hyper-V, SQL Server, Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Ubuntu Server, WireGuard, endpoint and hardware lifecycle management, Cisco Meraki, identity management (SSO, provisioning, and access reviews), DNS filtering (DNSFilter), and network failover.
Root-cause analysis, user accounts and permissions, backup and disaster recovery, Datto RMM, vendor coordination, CRM case documentation, pre- and post-sale technical support, help-desk and ticket oversight in a managed-service relationship, account security, and incident-oriented recovery work.
Python, PyTorch, Electron/Node.js, LM Studio, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), web development, technical specifications, SOPs and knowledge bases, beta testing, and AI-agent workflows with scoped access and human approval.
CAD and product design, reverse engineering, 3D printing, 3D scanning, laser engraving, stencil creation, photo editing, and small-batch production.
Company direction, business deals and outreach, finance and self-funding, vendor management, event representation, marketing, crew supervision, and ownership of an IT budget and vendor decisions.
Part on Demand
I'm the CEO, Co-founder, and Owner of Part on Demand, a custom fabrication business I lead and self-fund in Wheatland, Wyoming. This is not a side title on paper. It is a full operation I run by hand.
I set company direction, make business deals, and lead outreach. I also lead finance and self-fund the operation. That combination — owner, operator, and the person writing the checks — means I feel cost, risk, and delivery at the same time.
Customers come with a need, not a finished specification. I translate those requirements into technical specifications and quotes for CAD design, 3D printing and scanning, reverse engineering, laser engraving, and small-batch production. I design parts and reverse-engineer components for best-fit replacements, and I do the shop work myself.
I designed and built partondemand.com and provide pre- and post-sale technical support. I'm developing the PoD Hub, a catalog and shop platform being prepared for SaaS customers. I run beta testing on new releases myself. I provide cybersecurity and system administration for the business, and I write standard operating procedures so the operation does not live only in one person's head.
I handle photo editing and marketing, and I represent the company at events. Outreach and deal-making sit with me, not with a separate department. I also released PODMOD on Cults3D at no cost, as a community contribution — a designed part shared so other people can use it.
I also configure AI-agent workflows with scoped access, shared memory, and human approval before any external communications. Agents can help with the work, but a person still approves what goes out the door.
In beta
A catalog and shop platform, in beta, being prepared for SaaS customers — not only as an internal storefront, but as a product other businesses may use. I test new releases, find and document bugs, and verify fixes before launch.
Community release
A Part on Demand release, shared with the community at no cost on Cults3D. Some design work is for paying customers, and some of it is given to the community on purpose.
Company site
I designed and built the company website and use it as the public front of the fabrication business, including pre- and post-sale technical support for custom work. It supports real customer work, rather than existing only as a brochure.
IT leadership
At Western Building Supply I took an undocumented, vendor-dependent environment, made it understood, and made it more reliable. I'm steadily bringing the work in-house. That transition is in progress — not finished.
Western Building Supply LLC · August 2025–Present
Western Building Supply is a manufacturing and distribution company in Wheatland, Wyoming. I report to the COO, own infrastructure strategy, vendor and cost decisions, and the IT budget, and manage day-to-day IT for 27 managed endpoints, including 22 Windows workstations. I have supervised one direct report.
I also manage the company's outside managed-service provider — overseeing day-to-day service delivery, tickets, escalations, and documentation quality — while leading the design and build of in-house infrastructure to replace an outsourced managed-service model of approximately $30,000 per year. That in-house work includes an Active Directory domain controller (Samba AD), remote monitoring and management (Datto RMM), DNS filtering, backup and disaster recovery, and a WireGuard VPN on an Ubuntu Server VM. I own identity management, including single sign-on, provisioning, and access reviews.
A 280-page IT operations manual covering the company's full environment: device inventory, network and server documentation, Active Directory and DNS, backup and recovery, step-by-step runbooks and troubleshooting guides, security practices, and a dated change log. I wrote and maintain it as Director of IT, after mapping the environment I inherited from scratch. I also built an internal SOP Information Vault so that knowledge stays with the company. The manual itself is internal and is not reproduced here.
Reliability work started early and stayed specific. A Hyper-V host supporting three virtual servers had been crashing repeatedly. I traced the failures to memory errors and upgraded 16 GB of non-ECC RAM to 128 GB of ECC RAM, addressing the root cause rather than the symptom. In my first month, I independently restored business services when vendor access was blocking operations. I restored the company ownership's administrative control of the ISP account and coordinated a service upgrade from 100/20 Mbps to 500/500 Mbps. I expanded shop-floor Wi-Fi using available equipment and existing wiring, and I gained DNSFilter administrative access so filtering issues could be resolved in-house.
I built a virtualization consolidation host — a Ryzen 9 9950X with 128 GB of RAM — for server and remote-user virtual machines, tuned for stability, with a custom automatic Ethernet-to-Wi-Fi network failover. I designed a backup and disaster-recovery system with tiered versioned retention (half-hourly, daily, four weekly, and monthly), approximately 8 TB of backup capacity, restores verified by test-booting on separate hardware, and an outage-triggered backup freeze that protects the last good copy.
I migrated the truss design database from SQL Server 2019 to 2025 and ParadigmERP from SQL Server 2016 to 2019, each with about 30 minutes of hands-on work, and moved the customer-service system off the legacy server. Day-to-day support also covers Google Workspace, limited Microsoft 365 support, Active Directory, Hyper-V, ERP and design applications, phones, and network printers, in coordination with the managed-service provider on security, recovery readiness, and vendor escalation.
Manufacturing support is not limited to the server room. When a discontinued sawmill control and touchscreen display failed, I repaired it within 45 minutes of receiving the replacement parts.
I also build internal tools. Western Intelligence is a local knowledge assistant, built with Electron/Node.js, LM Studio, and retrieval-augmented generation, that lets staff retrieve company and vendor documentation through a desktop interface.
Jun 2020 – Aug 2021
As a Field Service Technician I diagnosed server, workstation, and laptop hardware faults on site, repaired equipment during the visit when possible, and identified or arranged replacement parts when needed. The territory extended from Nebraska to New Mexico. Recurring on-site service included Woodward across three Fort Collins and Loveland locations, and Broadcom in Fort Collins. I trained other technicians, though I did not formally supervise them. On additional contract work I installed Cat6 cabling and performed cable-certification testing with a Fluke Networks DSX-5000 for a Fort Collins hotel, and installed security systems. The move into this role — coming from food-service management — was pretty clean once they saw what I could do.
Apr 2022 – Jan 2023
Customer Service Representative in Helena, Montana. Phone, email, and chat technical support for motor-vehicle industry software. I documented customer cases in a CRM, escalated complex issues, and coordinated follow-up with internal teams. This is the formal, customer-facing support experience behind later work that looks more like infrastructure and product.
Ongoing
I provide informal IT support for about 20 people, including family, a Part on Demand business partner, several Discord communities, and a Minecraft server community of about 13 users worldwide. The work covers troubleshooting, setup, networking, and account security, with clients in Europe, the Philippines, the United States, and Cuba. I have also helped more than 50 people, at no charge, identify scams, clean up affected devices, and lock down compromised accounts. In one documented case, I followed a giveaway scam running through X direct messages from start to finish — including signs of a likely hijacked 2014 account, fabricated payment screenshots, an “activation fee” demand, and a push to move the conversation off the platform — and prepared an FBI IC3 complaint from the evidence. This is community and trust work, not a formal firm.
Projects
In beta
A catalog and shop platform, in beta, being prepared for SaaS customers. I run beta testing myself: testing new releases, finding and documenting bugs, and verifying fixes before launch.
Community release
A Part on Demand release published on Cults3D at no cost, as a community contribution.
Live site
The company website I designed and built, used as the public front of the fabrication business, including pre- and post-sale technical support for custom work.
Self-hosted assistant
A self-hosted assistant, with a person still in the loop. Oxidus v1 integrates local model APIs, hybrid retrieval, and desktop and web interfaces. Project components include metadata-filtered knowledge retrieval, approval-oriented agent controls, and reliability runbooks. Useful locally, scoped in what it can access, and built so a person remains responsible for what happens next.
Western Building Supply
Company knowledge, retrievable at the desktop. A local knowledge assistant built with Electron/Node.js, LM Studio, and retrieval-augmented generation, so staff can retrieve company and vendor documentation through a desktop interface. It is a practical answer to important knowledge trapped in manuals, vendor documents, and the heads of a few people. Internal detail that should stay private is not shown here.
In progress
The in-progress in-house build at Western Building Supply is itself a project: Samba Active Directory, Datto RMM, DNS filtering, a WireGuard VPN on Ubuntu Server, a Ryzen 9 9950X virtualization host with 128 GB of RAM and automatic Ethernet-to-Wi-Fi failover, and a backup and disaster-recovery system with tiered retention, about 8 TB of capacity, verified restores, and an outage-triggered freeze. Database migrations (truss design SQL Server 2019 to 2025, ParadigmERP 2016 to 2019) and moving the customer-service system off a legacy server belong in the same story. The transition is in progress and is not described as complete.
Writing
The books are part of the public professional story because they show a kind of follow-through that is easy to claim and hard to finish: I can carry a long written project to a published result. They also support the same communication strength visible in my operations manuals and SOPs. Both are available on Amazon.
Published book, available on Amazon.
Published book, available on Amazon.
Contact
I'm a hands-on IT leader, founder, and author, and I'm straightforward to reach. For Laughing Bald Man plans, or for a conversation about Part on Demand or IT work, start here.
Wheatland, Wyoming
