I’m in my fourth decade of answering, “What do you do for fun?” with, “I’m a musician.” Then comes the lament about not playing as much as I used to, between work and raising kids. I usually skip the longer answer about what “playing music” really means to me.
But you clicked on this, so here goes.
I taught myself to play music mostly by ear. I would cue up songs I liked, look at a chord chart, and keep working until what came out of my guitar sounded close enough to what came into my headphones.
I eventually took lessons and practiced enough to get pretty okay. Good enough that I dropped out of college for a bit to play in a few bands. That’s also when I got my first sales job, selling high-end guitars to collectors and working musicians.
In the end, the most success I had as a musician was after I went back to school and picked up acoustic gigs around town before Gator games. I finished grad school and entered the workforce because I didn’t want something I loved so much to become a “job.”
Several years later, during one of my first sales leadership roles, I had a boss who was also a musician. One day, he told me about his piano teacher getting frustrated with him because he just wanted to play the music. He didn’t want to slow down and study the scales.
He told me the story because he saw me doing the same thing.
I had good instincts. I could get results. I could usually “hear” when something wasn’t working. But he could tell I was playing by ear.
His point wasn’t that I needed to stop trusting my instincts. It was that if I slowed down long enough to learn the fundamentals of leadership (people, systems, and processes), I would be so much more effective.
Hearing it isn’t enough.
That lesson has stayed with me as I went from leading my first team to running entire organizations.
I learned how to understand people and performance. How to build mechanisms instead of relying on anecdotes. How sales, product, operations, marketing, and leadership fit together. How to recognize when a talented person was simply in the wrong seat, or when a group of smart people was working hard toward slightly different definitions of success.
I learned that being able to hear when something is out of tune is useful. Knowing why, and what to do about it, is much more valuable.
Looking back, the career moments when I was happiest weren’t tied to the biggest title, company, or number. They were the times I was helping people realize what they were capable of: finding confidence they didn’t know they had, becoming a team instead of a collection of individual performers, and building a structure that outlasted my personal contributions.
Leadership isn’t about showing everyone how well you can play. It’s about helping the entire room sound better.
Why Standard A
When I thought about the next part of my career, I kept coming back to those moments. I knew what I could do next. I was much more interested in what I wanted to do next.
I wanted to work with good people and build things. To walk into something unfinished, listen carefully, figure out what was working and what wasn’t, and help make it better.
That became Standard A Partners, a fractional GTM leadership and advisory firm. Standard A, for short.
The name is a callback to my earliest days of listening to music and tuning my guitar to match. What I didn’t know when I first started out was the theory behind “tuning up.” I just experimented until it sounded right. As I got more serious about playing with other musicians, I quickly learned what happens when someone is out of tune. That led me to discover the concept of concert pitch. Tuning the A above middle C to vibrate at precisely 440 Hz is the standard reference point for musical instruments. That vibration, 440 cycles per second, is the one frequency every instrument agrees on for optimal performance.
That standard doesn’t tell anyone what song to play or make every instrument sound the same. It simply gets everyone in tune so they can play together.
That’s how I expect Standard A to operate. It’s also why our logo pays quiet tribute to the A440 waveform.
My approach is to understand what the organization is trying to accomplish, identify which inputs make the biggest difference, and bring the right experience, tools, and structure to help the people already there (and those yet to join) perform at their best.
It’s also why I believe in the fractional operator model: success is leaving a company stronger than we found it, with systems built and running, and an organization equipped to carry them forward.
Play by ear. Know your scales.
I still believe in instinct. Experience teaches you to notice things that won’t always show up in a dashboard or a framework.
The most polished concert performances look effortless. What you don’t see are the hours of rehearsal, preparation, mixing, and tuning that made them possible.
Business works the same way. Growth that looks effortless is built on work most people never see. That’s the idea behind Standard A: a common reference point, the right tools, and experienced partners helping good people build something great.