Rob Horstmann

About Rob Horstmann

I’m an experienced IT professional with a passion for supporting the strategic goals of the company. I believe in people and strive to create engaged and highly productive teams, doing my best to ensure my co-workers and reports feel valued, trusted, empowered, challenged, and happy. I’ll always work to best align team members’ individual skills with key projects, vectoring them to increase velocity. It is essential to manage technology ROI and communicate the impact of what we are building to the team, development staff, and the company. If we have a clear view of the work we are doing today and how it supports our future projects, we’re ensuring the company is set up for success now while also propelling us into the future. For years I have used Agile methodologies and I rely on Jira to ensure the team and the company understand what projects are happening and how they are coming along. As a manager I have learned that change is inevitable, so I take stock of the skills that are already present in the team and what is needed from them to deliver on our promises. I like to allow time for collaboration to avoid creating silos of responsibility or making one person a ‘single point of failure.’ Working in IT means being a cost center in the organization. To contribute to the bottom line I am always on the lookout for opportunities to lower costs and overhead while maintaining or improving quality. I use real cost and usage data to drive decisions and am always willing to review current contracts, negotiate with vendors, and look for the best combination of on-premiss datacenters and AWS cloud solutions. I look to build relationships and business partners that offer the company efficient, cost-effective solutions.

Experience

1. IT Director

   Baden Sports

   Oct 2025 — Present · Kent, WA, US

   Reporting to the Chief Operating Officer (COO), the IT Director leads the strategy, implementation, day-to-day operations, and long-term planning of Baden Sports’ technology and information security. Scope spans all SaaS, on-prem, and online systems and accounts across Baden, Axebat, and Affiliates. The role partners closely with senior leadership, department managers, and end users to deliver secure, simple, and non-intrusive technologies that support business growth and efficiency.Key Responsibilities• Security: Drive continuous security improvements across physical, data, and network to keep the business, users and customers safe.• Innovation & Efficiency: Advance the tech stack with practical automation and simplification.• Planning: Own short and long-range technology roadmaps aligned to company goals.• Documentation: Establish standards, SOPs, and runbooks; keep documentation current.• Culture: Champions continual evolution/change/innovation with a goal of a simple, secure, service-oriented IT culture across the company that best supports growth.• Financial Stewardship: Advises executives on budgets, TCO, ROI, transparency, and savings for the department and technology advancements. Vendor Management: Works closely with all vendors to compress/consolidate our technology stack, improve efficiency and reduce costs.• Technical Debt: Reduce debt via consolidation, standardization, and pragmatic decommission plans.• Technology Governance: Evaluate and approve/decline new technologies for alignment with security, data protection, compliance, cost, integration, and supportability.

Education

• Portland State University

  na, General

  1989 — 1990

Skills

• Data Center
• System Monitoring
• Windows Server
• Virtualization
• Storage Area Networks
• Microsoft Exchange
• Vmware
• Servers
• Hp
• System Administration
• Red Hat Linux
• High Availability
• Vmware Esx
• Hardware
• Sharepoint
• Sql
• Apache
• Dns
• San
• Networking
• Centos
• Cloud Computing
• Cisco Technologies
• Saas
• Redhat
• Unix
• Troubleshooting
• Ubuntu
• Disaster Recovery
• Tcp/Ip
• Hybrid Cloud
• Amazon Web Services (Aws)