Advisory
Strategy is cheap when the person writing it also has to build it.
Most companies buy the thinking from one place and the building from another, then spend a year discovering the two didn't fit. I do both — which means the strategy is written by someone who will be accountable for shipping it.
Where it starts
MARKET & POSITIONING
Who the buyer actually is, what they'll pay for, and why they'd choose you over the thing they're using now.
Most product problems are positioning problems wearing a costume. I start by getting the market right—segment, buyer, willingness to pay, the competitive story—because everything downstream is cheaper once that's settled. Twenty-five years of this inside Fortune 100 companies and my own.
What gets built
PRODUCT STRATEGY & FIT
What to build, in what order, and how you'll know whether it's working before you've spent the budget finding out.
Roadmap, scope, and the sequencing that gets you to a real signal fastest. I care most about the question underneath the feature list: what has to be true for this to work, and what's the cheapest way to test it? The Jump reached 60%+ 30-day retention across 2,500 groups in 70 countries because we answered that before we scaled.
How it reaches people
GO-TO-MARKET
The offer, the pricing, the proof, and the path from a stranger's attention to a signed agreement.
Brand and messaging that survive contact with a sales conversation. Pricing models people can actually say yes to. The assets that carry a deal when you're not in the room. I ran a brand agency serving Microsoft, State Street and AARP, and before that led marketing inside BASF, Novartis and UnitedHealth Group.
And then it exists
IMPLEMENTATION
I build it. Production software, not a specification handed to someone else to interpret.
Multi-tenant platforms, payments, integrations, reporting, internal tools, AI-assisted workflows. Next.js and React Native, Postgres with row-level security, Stripe Connect, double-entry ledger accounting. Because I build with AI tooling, the gap between deciding and shipping is weeks rather than quarters.
Why this is unusual
Consultants hand you a plan. Developers build what you specify. The expensive gap is between them.
I spent fifteen years as an operating executive inside BASF, Novartis and UnitedHealth Group, then founded a strategy firm and a brand agency, then ran a venture-backed platform company as CEO for five and a half years. Now I build the software myself. That combination is the whole offer — the person deciding what to build is the person who has to make it work.
WHAT I BRING TO IT
Twenty-five years before any of this was a website. It's the part that makes the strategy worth something.
Revenue & Business Operations
Marketing that doesn't drive revenue isn't marketing. I've managed P&L at real scale — $400M+ at BASF, and as part of a team running billion-dollar product lines at Novartis. On the Air T board I'm looking at EBITDA, net operating income and capital allocation across business units. The discipline is the same whether it's a Fortune 100 division or a five-person startup: know what drives value and what doesn't.
Vision & Leadership
Built teams from scratch and inherited established ones — from three people to marketing organizations of 40+. At UnitedHealth Group I led teams growing through major acquisitions, PacifiCare and MAMSI, where whole departments merged into functions I ran. The skill isn't hiring well. It's knowing when to set direction and when to let good people figure it out.
Fortune 100 & Global 500
I know how enterprise actually works — the politics, the process, the patience it requires. Global initiatives across EMEA, APAC and the Americas, cross-functional teams across time zones and cultures. It's useful context for everything else: when I'm building for a startup, I understand how the large companies they're selling to make decisions.
HOW WE'D WORK
Three shapes, depending on how much of the problem is still unknown.
Strategy Sprint
Two to four weeks · fixed fee
$3,500 – $15,000
The fastest way to find out whether this works. I go deep on the market, the buyer and the product question, and hand back a positioning and product direction you can act on — usually with a working prototype attached.
- Market, buyer and positioning work
- Product direction and sequencing
- A working prototype where it helps
- Fixed-price plan for what follows
Advisory Retainer
Per month · ongoing partnership
$7,000 – $25,000
Continuous ownership of strategy and delivery. I hold the market thesis, the product direction and the architecture, and I ship the priority work each month rather than handing it off.
- Strategy, product and GTM ownership
- Priority work shipped every month
- Direct access — no account layer
- Scales with what the work requires
Build Engagement
Scoped · outcome-based
$75,000+
A complete system, from the strategy that defines it through to production. Scoped from a sprint so both of us know what done means, and what it's worth, before anything starts.
- Strategy through production
- Defined outcomes, not a task list
- Phased with real checkpoints
- Ongoing partnership after launch
Engagements are shaped around the outcome rather than an hour count. Where a pass-through cost is involved, it's quoted before it's incurred.
STRATEGY, THEN THE THING ITSELF
Four cases where the thinking and the building were the same job.
Found the market, built the product
Team Scout
High school, homeschool and club programs stuck on platforms built in 2014. I identified the gap, defined the product, and shipped it — multi-tenant SaaS with payments, ledger accounting and a mobile app.
60%+ retention · 70 countries
The Jump
$7M raised. 2,500+ groups, 3M+ records. Retention that high is a product-market-fit result, not a growth tactic — it came from getting the thesis right first.
Weeks → under five minutes
FPX / Bell Helicopter
A multi-year engagement rebuilding an enterprise quoting platform. Understanding the commercial process was most of the work; the software was the expression of it.
41 executive dashboards
State Street Global Advisors
Reporting unified across EMEA, the Americas, Japan and Asia Pacific for a $2.5T asset manager. Deciding what executives needed to see was the hard part.
WHERE I'M THE RIGHT CALL
The engagements that work best are the ones where someone has been trying to explain a business problem to engineers, or a technical constraint to executives, and losing something in between. That translation is most of the job.
I'm strongest where the market question is still open and the system is still to be built — new products, new segments, internal platforms, reporting and integration work, AI-assisted operations.
I'm not the right call for scaling or debugging a large existing codebase, or for deep infrastructure, performance engineering or security specialization. If that's what you need, I'll say so early and help you find the right specialist rather than learn on your budget.
Background
- VP Strategy & Marketing · UnitedHealth Group
- Marketing Director, US Pharma · Novartis
- Director Global Product & Marketing · BASF
- Founder & CEO · The Jump
- Board of Directors · Air T (NASDAQ: AIRT)
- Executive MBA · Harvard, Stanford & INSEAD
- B.A. Mathematics · St. Olaf College
Currently taking one additional engagement
Tell me what's been sitting on the list.
If there's something you've put off because it seemed too expensive or too slow to build, that calculation may have changed. Worth a short conversation either way.