Twenty-five years, then the method

Experience without method produces confident guesses. Method without experience produces a framework applied by somebody who has never had to make payroll from a website. We think you want both, and we are unusual in having taken them in that order.

The operating years came first — a catalog business run through marketplaces, wholesale and direct, with the analytics read every morning because the rent depended on it. The formal training came afterward, deliberately: statistics, data science, research design, consumer behavior. Not to learn marketing, but to find out which of the things twenty-five years had taught would survive contact with a method.

Most of them did. A few did not — and those are the ones worth talking about.