For companies too big to wing it and too small for a CFO
I find where yours actually is, what fixing it is worth, and — when the fix needs building — I build it.
I've run departments and I've been one. You deal with me start to finish — no partner selling it, no analyst delivering it, no handoff.
If any of these hit a nerve, keep reading. If none do, you probably don't need me — and I'll respect that.
You're bleeding money on software your team opened twice and forgot. Dead subscriptions, half-used tools, zero return — and the renewals keep hitting your card.
You spent real money on AI last year and still can't point at what it bought you. The enterprise licence renewed last month. It writes very good emails.
Your finance, marketing, and tech each live in a different person's head — and none of them talk to each other. So nobody's steering the whole ship.
You've outgrown the $20/hour freelancer but the real consulting firm wants $200K and a six-month "discovery phase" before they tell you anything useful.
Here's the part nobody mentions: every one of those problems shares a single root cause — fragmentation. And fragmentation has exactly one fix.
Someone who sees the whole board.A fractional CFO sees your finances. An agency sees your marketing. A developer sees your software. Nobody sees how your pricing sets your margins, your margins set the marketing you can afford, and that sets which customers you can win.
I look at the whole chain, find the link costing you, and fix it. Sometimes that's a better process. Sometimes it's a tool that doesn't exist yet. I do both, and I don't hand it off halfway.
Free, no sign-up, nothing you type leaves your browser. See all three.
How much you need to sell to cover your costs, and how much room you actually have if something moves against you.
Whether a project clears the bar you actually set, including what happens if the benefits come in lower than you hoped.
Budget against actual, ranked by what matters, with room to write down the reason beside each line and take it with you.
Two recent engagements — anonymized but real. Specific clients, specific results, no marketing fluff.
Founder had a unique certified product with strong differentiation but stagnant marketing. The image-generation tools they were using produced distorted assets unusable as ads. No clear product expansion path despite a premium manufacturing relationship.
A 2-year interactive growth strategy platform. Identified four adjacent product expansion opportunities using existing manufacturing assets. Replaced the marketing tools with purpose-built alternatives delivering 5-7x output. Mapped nine specific networking opportunities and built a complete SEO keyword strategy targeting near-zero-competition terms. Ranked marketing channels by revenue impact with live ROI calculators.
Established mortgage professional needed to stand out in a commoditized market and turn casual leads into qualified prospects faster. Existing tools were generic, slow, and forgettable.
A branded interactive pre-qualification platform combining lead capture, automated qualification logic, and educational content. The tool itself became a marketing asset — prospects engage with the platform, qualify themselves, and arrive at the first conversation already warmed up. Strategy and the tool that executes it, delivered together.
Here's the thing you should know about me before anything else: I cannot leave well enough alone.
When I stepped back from corporate life to raise my kids, I assumed the part of my brain that fixes things would take a break too. It did not. It just found new material.
I couldn't throw a football with my boys without getting on them about their hands. Tighten up. Catch it away from your body, stop letting it hit your chest first. Basketball was worse — elbow in, follow through, you're fading and you don't need to be.
They were, to be clear, having fun. I was running a quality program.
Toyota spent decades naming this and settled on Kaizen: continuous improvement. A large manufacturer I worked for ran it properly, and it worked. I'd just call it the norm. Why would you not take the time to make something better? Even when it's working well enough — well enough is a strange place to stop.
This is not always an attractive quality. My kids will confirm that. In a business it should be the house standard.
A Fortune 50 company. The largest pistachio and almond grower on earth. The third-largest cable operator in America. A public small cap. A factory floor. A graduate classroom. My own firm.
I know what a business looks like with a department for everything, and what it looks like with one person for everything. Most advisors have only seen one of the two — so I know which parts of the Fortune 50 playbook are worth carrying into a one-person shop, and which would strangle it.
There's a gap in the middle of my career and I'd rather explain it than let you guess at it. I stepped back from the corporate ladder to raise my three kids — fifteen years, no title, no straight line on paper. It cost me the tidy version of a resume and I'd make the same call again. It also turned out to be the best networking of my life, which I've written about properly.
For five of those years I taught business finance and critical thinking at the graduate level. That's where I learned that if you can't explain something plainly, you don't understand it yet — which is a standard I've held myself to ever since, sometimes uncomfortably.
Over the past year I taught myself to build production software properly — billing, authentication, automated testing, the lot. I mention it for one reason. The most common way a good recommendation dies is that nobody can implement it. When the answer to your problem is a tool that does not exist yet, I do not hand you a vendor list and wish you luck. I build it.
MBA from USC, undergraduate at UC Irvine, based in Carlsbad, California. Low tolerance for dead money and empty buzzwords. If you've got a business you believe in, I'd like to hear about it.
The first two steps are free and zero-commitment. You only have something to lose if you don't reach out.
Call me, or send a message. We talk about your business, your goals, and where you're stuck. No pitch, no pressure, no slide deck. If there's not a clear fit by the end of the call, we both move on with no awkwardness.
If the conversation went well, I put it in writing: what I think can be improved, how I'd go about it, how long it would take, and what it would cost. Four questions, four answers, no jargon. You read it on your own time with nobody in the room, and you decide. Still free, still no commitment.
If you want to go ahead, we lock the scope and the number before anything starts. Simple agreement, clear terms, no surprises later. Every engagement is structured individually — but the price is fixed before I begin, not discovered along the way.
I build. Production-grade, tested, monitored. You see progress throughout. We ship incrementally and validate with real users, not internal reviews. Strategy delivered as interactive platforms, software delivered to production.
Launch is the beginning. We monitor performance, optimize based on real data, and iterate. Most of my work comes from people I've already helped, which is the only incentive structure I've ever needed to keep making your business better.
Anything I can fix while I'm still looking at it, I fix. I don't hold back the quick wins to make the engagement longer — you'd notice, and you'd be right to.
Some problems can't be fixed in a month. Those get sequenced and dated, so you can decide what's worth doing and when, instead of being handed a list.
I set up reporting that tracks what each change actually earned or saved. It tells you whether the work paid for itself — which also means it tells you when it didn't. I check back to see whether the numbers held.
Honest answers to the questions that come up before every engagement.
Most AI spending returns nothing. MIT put it at 95% of corporate investment showing no profit impact; BCG found 70% of programs miss what leadership expected. That is not because the tools are bad. It is because a process nobody wrote down cannot be automated.
So I start with the process. Some of what I find should be automated, some should just be fixed, and some should be left alone. Where a good tool already exists, I will point you at it. Where one does not and the numbers justify building it, I will build it. What I will not do is sell you software you did not need.
Perspectives from Fortune 50 finance and operations — applied to building software and growing small businesses.
The best consultants I worked with could listen for twenty minutes and tell me, in one sentence, how wrong I'd been. That sentence was never why the engagement worked. Here's the question to ask before you hire anyone: after you hand me this, who actually does it?
Read articleI started using AI in September 2025 the way most people still do — as a fancy search engine. Six months and one production app later, here's what I learned about where AI earns its keep, where it quietly lies to you, and why "just use AI" is terrible advice. The anchor of a full series on building real software with AI.
Read articleYou have an idea for software, no reliable way to tell whether it's any good, and a half-remembered quote somewhere north of fifty thousand dollars. So it sits. Here's the version of that conversation I'd rather have, starting with whether the idea survives before anyone talks about building anything.
Read articleMIT says 95% of corporate AI spending shows no profit impact. That isn't a verdict on the technology — it's a verdict on what it was pointed at. You cannot automate a process nobody wrote down, and in a small business almost everything lives in somebody's head. What I do instead, in four piles.
Read articleMost improvement plans fail because the first visible result is nine months out, and nothing survives nine months of a company's attention. I learned the alternative on a factory floor — along with which half of it reliably worked and which half didn't.
Read articleAt Cox I built the business cases for capital projects that had to clear an 18% hurdle rate. Most good ideas didn't clear it. Spending a year in that seat teaches you something useful: a recommendation with no number attached isn't a recommendation yet.
Read articleHourly, day rate, fixed fee, retainer, outcome share, equity. Nobody picks a pricing model — you get handed one, and by then you're arguing about the number instead of the structure. Six models, what each one quietly rewards, and how to tell which is being used on you.
Read articleSomeone tries AI, gets a generic answer, and decides the whole thing is overhyped. The answer was generic because the question was. Five mistakes almost everyone makes in the first ten minutes, and what using it properly actually looks like.
Read articleA lender is legally required to tell you why you were declined, but nobody publishes those reasons in aggregate. The SBA's own rulebook does — and it changed substantially in June 2025. What actually disqualifies an application, and what to fix six months before you apply.
Read articleBig companies don't start bloated — they earn their way there. From inside Fortune 50 finance, here's why the exact things that make a company successful are what slow it down, what the waste actually costs, and why one operator with AI can now out-run a committee.
Read articleI started this blog to get found, learned SEO by playing the game on my own site, and came away with one conviction: SEO isn't a service you bolt on later and pay monthly for — it's a set of decisions made while the thing is being built. Here's what that means for anything I build for you.
Read articleFor a decade my job title was, officially, nothing — sweatpants, school pickup, snack duty. And I'm fairly sure I built a bigger, more useful network in those ten years than in my whole corporate finance career, without ever once 'networking.' Here's how that happened, and why it beats every conference you'll ever attend.
Read articleI build software for a living, so when a custom-dev shop pitched me, I knew exactly what to ask. Watching the standard playbook unfold — dodged pricing, pay-before-you-see-it, 'just hop on a call' — is the best argument I know for buying differently. Here's how to protect yourself.
Read articleMost consultants take 6 weeks and $30K to deliver a strategy deck. I deliver an interactive growth platform in 72 hours — competitive analysis, marketing channels, product expansion, networking roadmap, SEO strategy, and live ROI calculators. Here's exactly how.
Read articleAgencies quote $150K. Freelancers say $15K. The AI-native solo builder? Under $5K in tools with enterprise-grade architecture. A transparent breakdown of what it actually costs to build production SaaS today.
Read articleAfter a career managing P&Ls — Fortune 50 included — I started building production software using AI tools. Here's what most technologists get wrong — and what most business people don't realize is now possible.
Read articleEvery agency drops AWS and Kubernetes into their pitch to sound impressive. I use Vercel, Supabase, and Stripe. Here's why the unsexy stack wins — and why I'll replace any of it tomorrow if something better comes along. A Kaizen approach to technology.
Read articleIf you are not ready to hand over the whole business, start with one area you already suspect is costing you money. Fixed scope, fixed price, both agreed before I start. At the end you get one written answer: what I found, what each finding is worth, and what I would do first. If you want to go further, we talk. If not, the report is yours.
Whether you have a clear project in mind or a business problem that might benefit from technology, let's talk. No cost, no commitment, no pitch. A conversation between a business strategist and a potential partner.
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