About
Most consultants come from one world. This one comes from several — including yours.
It started with live sound systems at 16 — and the fast realization that working for yourself beats working for someone else. That turned into a touring sound & lighting company working with bands like Nine Inch Nails, Metallica, B.B. King, and many more.
Then the internet showed up.
CoffeeCup, one of the first HTML editors ever made, came next — 14 years, roughly 60 software products, and a web hosting company that grew to over 25,000 customers in less than 18 months. Both businesses were sold. After that came Nine Labs, a product strategy and design consultancy with a particular focus on travel and hospitality — serving hotel groups, travel tech companies, and F&B brands that needed product leadership they couldn't hire full-time.
Along the way: Writing Loops: Building Products with Clarity & Confidence — the book behind every engagement. An executive MBA program through Wharton Business School's Executive Education. An advisor role at Georgia Tech's Advanced Technology Development Center. Speaking at conferences and workshops on four continents.
Then came hospitality — from the inside.
Three years running a wine bar. Now the owner of a dual-concept restaurant — Lucky Hare Bar & Grill and Night Train Pizza — in Big Canoe, Georgia. That operator experience exposed a real gap: restaurant management tools built by people who'd never run a restaurant. So Donna was built — an AI-powered platform that turns POS data into clear, actionable intelligence for operators. That's what it looks like when AI is applied to a real problem by someone who understands both the technology and the business.
Savarin & Co. followed — a luxury wine and food travel company built on direct relationships with winery and vineyard owners across Spain, France, and Italy. WSET Level 3 certification. The same rigor applied to curating world-class guest experiences as to building software products.
The thread through all of it
Figuring out what people actually need, then building it. Right now that means helping travel, hospitality, and F&B companies cut through the AI noise and make decisions that hold up. Not as a theorist — as someone who's built the products, owned the businesses, and used AI daily across strategy, analysis, operations, and code for years. Not an AI tourist. Someone who builds with it.
Product strategy grounded in real experience.
Not frameworks borrowed from a textbook — patterns that have worked (and failed) across dozens of industries over three decades. The products have been built, the companies run, the mistakes made.
A human-centered approach.
Everything starts with the customer. Their problems, their behavior, their perception of value. Get that right and product decisions get dramatically easier.
AI fluency that goes beyond the hype.
AI is part of how this work gets done every day — strategy, analysis, operations, code. The real leverage points are clear, and so are the dead ends. Not every problem needs a model. The ones that do need the right strategy around them.
Honest, direct thinking.
Expect to hear what's true, not what's comfortable. That's the only way the work is useful. When an idea is great, you'll hear that. When it's not — and why — you'll hear that too.