Can he think?
How I approach the work.
I don't treat marketing and operations as two departments.
They're two halves of one machine, and almost every problem a founder brings me has already crossed between them before I show up. A sales problem that's really a routing problem. An ops problem that's really a wrong-customer problem. Figuring out which side it started on is most of the job.
I teach people to think, not to follow a playbook.
Playbooks fall apart the moment something changes. Judgment gets better with use. When I took a leadership team from nine people down to four, I didn't hand the four a binder. I taught them how to reason about the call in front of them, which is why it held up after I left.
When I'm missing a skill, I go get it.
In 2007 the whole model I'd built a career on stopped working. I didn't defend it. I spent a year inside an SEO agency learning a channel I knew nothing about. That reflex shows up everywhere below, and it's the real reason I can be useful in an industry I've never worked in.
Give me your numbers and I'll find the story in them before the coffee's done.
I love data and I take it in fast. That isn't a party trick. It's the reason the first conversation is usually worth having even if we never work together, because most founders are sitting on the answer already and just haven't had anyone read it back to them.
Has he done it?
Where the experience actually comes from.
I've run a company, not just advised one.
Three years as president of a 75-person business, with the profit and loss in my name. From a $200K loss to more than $600K in profit in two years, inventory losses down 90%, active customer base up 40%. That's not a turnaround I watched. I signed for it.
I've built the marketing myself, not just the strategy deck.
A direct mail program that went from 10,000 pieces a month to over 100,000 a week, plus a custom system I built so that when someone called in, the person answering already had their name and their numbers on screen. It produced $249M in loan volume in eleven months, about 90% of the company's total.
I've been the founder who became the bottleneck.
Six and a half years running my own agency. Clients wanted me, personally. Everyone I trained well eventually left to do it on their own. I raised prices twice and finally sold the client list. I'm not theorizing about this problem. I paid full price for the lesson.
Do I want him around?
Everything you'd know by day ninety anyway.
I'm big on energy and alignment. I loathe negative self-talk and mean people.
I love the work and I throw myself into it, but it's a part of who I am, not all of it. If that reads soft, it isn't. It's the reason I'm useful for years instead of months, and it's the filter I run every engagement through.
I have three or four dozen movie quotes in everyday rotation, and I will use them in your meetings.
The Princess Bride, too good not to know every line of. The Office, where there is a Michael Scott moment for every business situation and I will find it. Three Amigos, a classic, and that is the entire review. Next Generation, because we all wanted Picard to be real. Do not call me a Trekkie. And if Armageddon is on, I'm watching it. No apologies.
I plan my week around bacon cheeseburgers and tacos.
I don't meticulously track macros, but I know them. The burgers and the tacos are the treat, not the daily intake. Which, now that I write it down, is more or less my entire approach to running a business. Know the numbers, design for the exception, stop pretending.
Classic muscle cars and Porsches. Raw power on one end, precision on the other.
Which is not a coincidence. I like both ends of most things. Just as happy running a weekend in Vegas, craps and slots if you're asking, as spending days away from the crowds in Ouray. Just as comfortable doing manual labor all day at my parents' place in Marble Falls as I am at a keyboard.
Curious by default, good with numbers, genuinely terrible at geography.
I can build a computer, program a website from back before there were vibe coders, and set up serious AI automation. I can also drive a CAT and ride a horse. The geography thing is not a bit. It's a real and persistent gap and my family finds it very funny.
I spend at least thirty minutes a day playing with my chihuahua. The dog I didn't want.
I do it because it enriches her life. That's the whole reason. I'm also walking a 5.5 mile daily average this year, which is not a resolution. It's an average.
