Have you ever wondered, “how did I get here?” Writing my founder story got me thinking about this the other day. But here's what I realized: my story isn't really about me.
It's about the same expensive mistakes I saw kill growth at every company I've worked with. Mistakes that cost marketers, business development leaders, and owners sleep, revenue, or both:
Mistake #1: Spending thousands on campaigns you can't attribute to a single closed deal
Mistake #2: Building beautiful systems that your team won't actually use
Mistake #3: Drowning in reports while revenue leaks out through operational gaps
Sound painfully familiar?
Every business leader has a story about their ‘AHA’ moment. Mine cost about $2.3 million in other people's money across 22 years of “learning opportunities.” But that expensive education taught me to spot the patterns that kill growth — patterns I see everywhere now.
Sometimes the most inefficient career path teaches you how to build the most efficient solutions.
Lesson #1: Efficiency is Directly Tied to Fixing Inefficiencies
It was the late 80s at Michigan State, sitting in a room full of business students picking majors. This guy walks in representing a brand new program called Materials and Logistics Management.
“Are your CDs alphabetized?”
Well, yes, all my CDs were alphabetized.
“Do you know exactly how much is in your checking account right now?”
Yeah, I knew my balance to the penny.
“When you run errands, do you map out the fastest, most efficient way to get everything done?”
Based on that five-minute pitch, I signed up for supply chain management.
Who knew I was wired to find inefficiencies and fix them? But how valuable was this “skill?”
According to recent research by The Coder’s Guild, inefficiency costs SMBs almost $90k each year (in a five-person team). This includes tool-hopping, duplication, and unclear task ownership. Here’s how that breaks down: your employees lose 13.7 hours per week in productivity, which is equivalent to almost $18k per employee annually.
A mere 1% annual productivity uplift? Tens of thousands of dollars.
Lesson #2: ‘Busy’ Doesn't Mean ‘Profitable’
After graduation, I wasn't excited about the automotive supplier jobs being thrown at me. So naturally, I moved to Hawaii with $500 and became a cocktail waitress. (First month's rent was $450 — cutting it close!)
Here's where the expensive education began.
The bar owner noticed my resume and asked if I could help with cost tracking. The place was packed every night, staff working their asses off, but profits were wildly inconsistent.
Using Excel and our Berg system data, I created a system to track alcohol costs by shift, by type, and by server. Suddenly, we could see the bleeding: evening shift was over-pouring by 15%, certain servers were too generous with “regulars,” pushing high-margin shots during low-margin times.
The owner was thrilled. “Our revenue is up!” he said.
“Actually,” I corrected, “revenue is about the same. Your profit margins are up 23% because we stopped the waste.”
The pattern was forming: Most businesses mistake activity for results. But busy doesn't mean profitable.
We rolled this out to other clubs in Waikiki, and I spent my days running numbers and afternoons playing beach volleyball. But I was already asking: “Where are we actually making money, and how do we make more of it?”
Lesson #3: Complexity Kills Adoption
Back in Michigan, I landed at Weller Truck, where the brothers were implementing a custom inventory system for truck parts. Think your inventory is complicated? Try tracking new parts, after market parts, repair work, and “cores” — used parts you rebuild and resell.
Every day brought the same conversation: “We need better reporting!”
But when I dug deeper, they didn't need better reports. They had 47 different data points, but only used eight to make decisions. Classic complexity death spiral.
Then Paul got this wild idea: put those gigantic parts interchange books online. TruckLink was born. We spent months building what we thought was elegant, intuitive, comprehensive. They wanted what worked in their workflow.
The failure taught me something expensive: Complexity kills adoption. The best system in the world won't work if people won't use it. Your team will work around new systems that don't fit their reality.
This pattern followed me everywhere. Years later at Konica Minolta, complexity exploded when the companies merged: branches, dealers, VARs, overlapping territories. We reviewed six CRM solutions to unify tracking. They picked the seventh option they hadn't considered.
Why? Because the other six would have required their salespeople to change how they actually worked. The winning solution adapted to their existing workflow.
Lesson #4: You Can’t Improve What You Can’t Measure
At MarketNet, I worked with large manufacturers who had complex dealer networks. This is where I developed my obsession with proving what actually drives sales — not just leads, not just “awareness,” but actual revenue.
When HON did national advertising, they'd generate leads with no system for distribution, no tracking, no way to prove which tactics generated sales.
We built an automated system: leads distributed by territory, dealer status, product interests. But here's where it got interesting — we asked dealers to tell us what happened.
“Why would we do that?”
“Because dealers who help us prove what works get more and better leads.”
It was convoluted, full of averages and guesses, but for the first time ever, we could tell a $2B manufacturer: “This campaign generated $847K in actual sales. This one generated $12K. Want to guess which one we should do more of?”
For nine years, I traveled everywhere, obsessed with making marketing prove its worth. But here's what I discovered: You can't just measure everything. You have to measure what actually predicts revenue.
The breakthrough: Most companies drown in data but starve for insights. They're tracking 47 metrics but only eight drive decisions. They know their website traffic to the decimal point but can't tell you which campaigns generated actual customers.
At every company, same conversation: “We need better attribution.” That’s becoming more and more difficult in today’s market. But what they really needed was a clearer understanding of what actually drives their business.
Perfect measurement is the enemy of good decision-making. Better to have directional accuracy on what matters than precise data on what doesn't.
Lesson #5: Everything Can Be More Efficient
Fast-forward to the late 90s tech boom. I rolled out a dial-up internet product at USXchange, competing with AOL. Billboards everywhere: “Bye Bye AOL.” We measured impressions, click-through rates, sign-ups—all trending up!
But here's what we missed: people didn't know what they'd do with faster internet. They were excited about email and checking the weather. We were trying to create demand instead of finding existing demand and making it easier to fulfill.
At Pandesic in San Francisco, I watched this same issue on a massive scale. Every e-commerce store needed its own servers. So we had monthly indicators for everything: server uptime, response times, satisfaction scores. Three-hour meetings, but only an hour of actual work.
When 9/11 happened, everything changed instantly. All our competitive positioning became irrelevant overnight. That’s when I learned — crisis strips away everything non-essential and shows what really matters. Most businesses are carrying way more non-essential weight than they realize.
When you eliminate bottlenecks, avoid non-essential work, and are quick to pivot away from what’s not working, you can make things more efficient.
The Perfect Storm: When All the Pieces Clicked
I landed at a software company as VP of Marketing, met my business partner Adam Clarke, and got promoted to President. Together, we developed a systematic model that scaled the company 30% year-over-year—from $8M to over $10M in 12 months. Here's what we did differently:
- Eliminated silos between sales, marketing, and customer success- Measured leading indicators that actually predicted revenue (not vanity metrics)
- Automated handoffs so leads couldn't fall through cracks
- Built feedback loops so we knew what worked and what didn't
This wasn't marketing tactics — it was removing friction from the entire revenue engine.
The result: Predictable, sustainable growth without the chaos.
My tipping point came when I was told, “If you want to do things your own way, maybe you should start your own business.”
Maybe that WAS the thing to do.
So I started 1 Bold Step. What began as a fractional marketing agency, evolved into a complete revenue operations approach that aligned every team around metrics that actually mattered. We call it a growth agency.
The repositioning wasn't easy. We turned away prospects who just wanted marketing help. But the growth was intense — what started out as just Adam and me, grew to 20 people in what felt like minutes.
My Little Bonus Lesson
Looking back, I took the least LEAN career path possible. Michigan to Hawaii to Los Angeles to Michigan to San Francisco… But that inefficient journey gave me something no single-industry career could: the ability to see the same patterns across completely different business models. And the confidence to challenge, “that's how we've always done it.”
Every seemingly random pivot taught me something essential:
- Efficiency is directly tied to fixing inefficiencies
- Busy doesn't mean profitable
- Complexity kills adoption
- You can't improve what you can't measure
- Everything can be more efficient
I didn't know I was building expertise in plugging revenue leaks. I thought I was just bouncing around, trying to figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up.
Turns out, the most inefficient path teaches you how to build the most efficient solutions.
The Real Story
Here's the thing: I'm convinced more of us should share these messy, expensive journeys. There's power in the real story — not the polished version, but the one with costly mistakes and happy accidents.
If you're building something meaningful, and you recognize these patterns — campaigns you can't prove worked, systems your team won't use, reports that don't help you make decisions — you don't have to learn them the expensive way.
That's my story, at least the version I'm willing to admit cost me the most sleep and money. I'm still learning, still convinced that everything can be more efficient, still helping entrepreneurs plug the leaks before they become floods.
If my story resonated with you even a little, then find me on LinkedIn. I promise to share more personal stories, practical lessons as I continue to build my own business, and jokes that are definitely funnier in my head than they are out loud.
