I started off as a computer programmer by training, so in school, I went into computer programming. At one point, I was coping with IBM, and I saw one of those IBM sales guys go through the coat and red power tie and I was like, that's interesting. I was one of those programmers that had a few social skills so I was like, I think I'll do that. So, out of school, I actually went into sales instead of going into programming, rose to my highest level of incompetence in sales and then came back and started coding. In the nineties, I ran my own business because I knew I wanted to remain in software business so I started that with a partner and we got blown up in the dot-com burst of 2000 and then after that, I started again growing back into the employment, and I built the web digital websites, back ends for a number of technology companies for lead generation. In 2006, I went to the seminar. It was wizards of the web out of the Wizard Academy near Austin, which is an amazing, unusual business school and I was first introduced to conversion and this was the culmination of combining my programming skills, my marketing, my sales, the fact that I'm just not a very good employee side, my entrepreneurial side, there really was nothing else that I could do but become a conversion scientist and start applying data to marketing. In the digital world, we were starting to get amazing tools to help us understand how visitors are interacting, so it was a perfect time. I hung a shingle, put on a lab coat and found conversion sciences and I am doing that ever since.

I first started as a consultant so the thing I heard the most from the other consultants was by the name impostor syndrome. You're new at this, especially in conversion optimization, it was a new set of disciplines and so you have to really fight against that voice in your head that says, "Oh, you don't know what you're doing." It sometimes could be a helpful voice because it makes sure you work hard, you double your work, whereas later in life experience will take you where you don't have to work quite that hard. So understanding expectations was the most important learning curve. For the clients, you begin to understand what's important to them and what's not important to them and there's a tendency for results to be really smart and to have all the right answers as you get more experienced, you'll temper that with what the client really needs, what really moves the client forward and sometimes you don't have to be quite as smart and clever as you think you do. Some very simple answers will help move them forward. So really that whole process of setting expectations with your clients, facilitating your meetings with the clients and getting comfortable in your own skin are really the things that I was challenged with when I first started.

Our foundation for everything is web analytics. Most of our clients have Google analytics, it's a fantastic tool, especially for smart clients, it's free and provides all of the information and data that we need. Layered on top of that is what's called a Tag manager which helps you manage what sort of tools, data collection tools are going on to the website and also helps you manage what kind of data Google Analytics is collecting from your site. On top of that, we like to use tools like Hotjar. It's a collection of user intelligence, so it collects where people are clicking, how far are they scrolling on a page, where their mouse is moving so the kind of attention because oftentimes, their mouse is where we follow our eyes, we can do user surveys, we can track forms, we could build out funnels. Hotjar really is one tool that collects all of these user intelligence capabilities in one place and allows us to really understand on a page by page basis what people are understanding. It also records sessions, it's like we could record sessions of people visiting the site, and it's almost like looking over somebody's shoulders and then using the website and it's very helpful so that's the next layer. On top of that, we will generally have maybe testing tool for best ideas so all of this stuff is for us to collect ideas, and decide which of those is most likely a big issue and rather than just changing and putting on the side, we will subject it to an A/B test where we test the current side against the version of the page has our idea line so change the headline or move something around or make the form shorter or make the form longer, we could do almost anything with these tools. The first visitor sees the control, the second visitor sees the variation, and we repeat this until we get a statistical significance and then we could tell which one generated the most sales. That's a great way to test out your ideas. As long as we've been doing this, we still get things wrong, every audience is unique, every audience is different so it's an amazing tool. Those were probably the most important, that's kind of our stack that we have with most of our clients.