The Team
Built to serve the Blade Service Industry
Alfred Crabtree - CEO, Founder
Alfred entered the blade services industry in 2015 as a second career, via rope access. As an avid caver in the southeast, Alfred developed rope access skills for the sake of cave exploration and expedition. After involvement in two life saving rescues, he pursued certification in Cave Rescue. Learning that SPRAT was a similar money and time commitment, he went that path, and soon after found employment at Rope Partner, where his experiences learning the skills and wanting to pass them on made him yearn to train. The last two seasons were spent at WindCom as the Training Development Manager, where he developed the training program from scratch and ran 200 trainees through it in that time.
Realizing the program should be scaled even more, should be a profit center, and should help improve the overall performance of the industry, he opened Blade Repair Academy in Jan 2023.
Alfred lives in Tennessee, and has family obligations that demand coming off the road and being local. It made sense to open the academy and share this knowledge with technicians in the proper training environment.
He is an avid outdoorsman, enjoying paragliding, mountain biking, paddling, caving, snowboarding, and generally mucking about in the woods.
Michael Hale - CTO, Founder
Michael’s crossover from communications technology to renewable energy brings decades of global-scale entrepreneurial, engineering and executive experience to BRA. Michael was an Internet pioneer, developing and leveraging platforms for advertising, lead generation, video streaming and data-driven web applications in 1997. Since then, he’s focused the past 26 years on fatherhood, personnel mentoring and problem solving at scale for the cable provider Cox Communications and Internet giant Google. Since 2013, Michael has been deeply involved with the action-oriented non-profit Abolish Slavery Coalition, whose global programs result in the investigation, relocation and rehabilitation of hundreds of victims of human trafficking.
Zachary Cunningham -
Operations Administrator, Founder
