The kid who took the watch apart never stopped.

I was the kid who took everything apart. Not to break it. I wanted to know how the watch was made. Then a Commodore 64 landed in the house, and that was it: DOS, floppy disks, video games. My uncle, a computer engineer, taught me to write my first programs, and making something run from a blank screen hooked me for good.

The rest of me lived in drawing, music, books, and movies, with a puzzle always in progress. The stories were puzzles too. I took them apart the same way I took apart the watch, chasing why people choose the way they do. Creative on one side, analytic on the other, and curious about people in the middle. I didn't have a word for that combination yet. It turned out to be marketing.

No marketing degree. A couple of years of college, then straight into sales, and it worked from the start. Not because I was a “smooth talker.” Because I asked questions, studied hard, and outworked the plan. The first lesson has never stopped being true: people are the ones buying. Every deal is a person deciding to trust you.

Six years into carrying a quota, one of the world's largest print technology makers created a new regional marketing role and gave me the shot. The creative side and the analytic side finally had one job, and that role grew into leading field marketing across twenty-plus states, then into bigger rooms, and the climb never really stopped.

The résumé says Fortune 500, mega dealer, and small privately owned company. It says marketing run across the U.S., the U.K., and Canada. What it really says is rooms. Rooms full of brilliant sales leaders, technology leaders, and agency minds, with me listening hard and keeping every playbook that earned its place.

One pattern kept surfacing, and it became the foundation of everything I do now: the challenges are the same at every scale. A global enterprise and a local dealership stall in the same places. The logo on the door changes. The physics do not. And once you can see the physics, you can fix them anywhere.

In 2024 I dug in the way I dig into everything. I started where everyone started, in a chat window, half novelty and half curiosity. Then I took a four-month MIT Professional Education certification in applied generative AI, and the novelty burned off. The work was intense, and it never once felt like homework. What felt heavy then feels almost elementary now. That is how fast this water rises, and I have stayed in it every day since.

For the last year and a half I have worked almost entirely in the Claude ecosystem, building in Claude Code. The real shift came the day I left the chat window for the terminal: version control, shipped apps, real workflows, building and failing and learning daily. There is no easy button here, and no weekend course that makes you dangerous. The depth is the work.

And here is the honest truth about AI leverage: I'm working harder than I've ever worked, and the quality of work I'm putting out is better than it's ever been. That is the trade. I would make it again every morning.

I'm 52. I've worked for Fortune 500s, for mega dealers, and for a small privately owned firm where I served as the company's first chief marketing and technology officer. In all those years I never had something that was purely mine. Haney Strategy is that something. I put my family's name on it because it carries everything those years built, and I don't put that name on work I'm not proud of.

The plan is bigger than a consulting shingle. I'm taking everything I absorbed one company at a time and putting it to work for many, and I'm building the firm to outgrow me. Haney Strategy is meant to become bigger than Jim Haney.