I started my career as a consultant, immersed in customer research and competitive analysis. When I moved into the corporate world, it was to complete the picture — not just strategy, but implementation, go-to-market, and delivery. I wanted to see it through.

What I found, watching strategy meet the real world for two decades, is that the pull toward the financials is strong enough that executives forget to start with the customer, even when they swear they haven't. There's a lot of lip service paid to "understanding the customer." In practice, it often doesn't happen. What I know — and what I have built my work around — is that a services strategy worth anything starts with what customers actually need, delivers on what they were promised when they bought the solution, and helps them get more value than they expected. The customer is at the center of my thinking. Always.

I also learned something I didn't expect: the same gap exists with employees. Companies say the right things about developing their people, the same way they say the right things about understanding their customers. Customers known but not truly understood. Employees present but not truly seen. It shows up most at the middle manager and director level, the place where strategy either gets real or dies trying.

This is a full-circle moment. I've come back to consulting, now as Growth Edge, with something I didn't have the first time: real understanding of what it takes to make customer-centered strategy survive contact with a real organization. And I've built something alongside it — a coaching practice that grew from the same thirty years, grounded in the belief that the people implementing strategy deserve the same investment as the customers they're serving. Two lanes, one foundation.