I was born in a country that no longer exists. The Soviet Union felt permanent right up until the morning it wasn't. I was young, but the lesson stuck and became the way I look at everything since: the systems that present themselves as solid and inevitable are usually the ones with the deepest cracks. Most people argue with the surface. I've spent my life going underneath it.
That instinct turned into a method, and the method is the only thing here worth your attention.
As an economist, with an M.A. in Macroeconomics, I was trained to ask what's really driving a number, not just what the number says. I spent fifteen years doing that inside multibillion-dollar multinationals, in business analysis and commercial control: process gap analysis and the reengineering that closed them, commercial negotiation, sales, marketing, and stretches of general management. Fifteen years of being measured on it every year, not fifteen years of describing it.
That is also the whole answer to why somebody outside sees what the people inside cannot. It was never a job that sat inside one department. The expensive problems live on the seams between functions, and almost nobody's job description reaches across them. Mine did. Later, running my own technology and operations consulting agency, I saw the same gap from the outside, in other people's companies.
The pattern is always the same. The complaint someone arrives with is a symptom. The cause is usually a structural decision that made sense once and was never revisited.
What that looks like
A company doing well over a hundred million a year hired me for a profitability question nobody in the building could answer. Everyone assumed pricing, or costs, or the market. It was none of those. Two departments had annual goals that contradicted each other, so one closed at whatever price closed the deal and the other was left accountable for a margin those deals had already spent. Every department was hitting its number. The company was losing margin because they were hitting their numbers. Nobody inside could see it, because seeing it meant standing outside all of the departments at once.
That's the work. Not being smarter than everyone in the room, but looking underneath the question instead of just answering it.
I build, not only advise
The habit only means something if it survives contact with execution. I build software, and I ship it.
Taxformify is the clearest example. Three of my friends are tax accountants, and every season I watched them drown, chasing clients for documents and losing hours to chaos their whole field had accepted as "how it is." The obvious read was that they needed better tools. The real problem was that they didn't have five tool problems, they had one workflow problem wearing five disguises. So my co-founder and I built the fix. It was named one of Edmonton Unlimited's 10 Companies to Watch for 2026, selected from 59 applicants, and listed in Scale Up Canada's Edmonton50.
Taxformify isn't the headline. It's the evidence, and it's the reason I can promise that every claim I make comes backed twice: once with a source you can open yourself, and once with something I have actually done. When I can only do one of those, I say so.
What you are actually buying
I'll be straight with you, because I'd rather you trust me than be impressed by me. I ran a technology and operations consulting agency for years and then deliberately wound it down, not because it failed, but because I wanted to build and think instead of sell hours. That decision is the reason nothing I recommend makes me money, and one of the cases on this site ends with the right answer being cancel this, you already own the fix. The longer version of that argument is on the consulting page.
Where I'm genuinely limited: I think for a living, I don't staff builds. And you'll have to judge me on how I think, because there's no logo wall here doing it for you. I prefer it that way.
Elsewhere
I write about economics, equity-based business structures, and why so many "permanent" systems are more fragile than they look. The hardest case I ever worked on was my own, and it's the one piece here where I'm inside the situation instead of outside it. I speak English, Russian, Azerbaijani, and Turkish, get by in French, and I'm working on Arabic. Languages have always been less about translation for me and more about access to how other people see.
If any of this resonates, read what I write. If you have a decision in front of you and would rather not make it alone, that is what I do for money, and I will tell you when the answer is that you do not need me.