Thirty years of people who still call.

I had just been hired to run internet marketing at Veterinary Pet Insurance and was introduced to John by a close friend. The year before, the VPI website had brought in about $330,000. John and his team rebuilt it from the ground up: the quote engine, the enrollment process, separate experiences for pet owners, veterinarians, and breeders.

Within four years it was bringing in $16.8 million a year and had become about 40% of all our new sales. It helped make the company profitable, and that company is known today as Nationwide Pet Insurance.

What I would want another executive to know is that John thinks about the business first and the technology second. I have worked with him for more than twenty years, and he is still one of the first calls I make.

I have run Legacy Digital since 2001, and I know the film and tape conversion business well. We serve everyone from Hollywood executives to families who need their legacy media digitized.

I met John in 2006 through a friend, and we started working together in 2008. At the time, Legacy was finding customers at home shows and fairs. We worked mostly in Southern California, and I drove to pick up and deliver most orders myself. John moved the business online, and he laid out how: the website, the advertising, the customer tracking, and a referral program. Today I only pick up and drop off the larger orders, and we serve customers across North America and in other countries.

Over the years we have kept refining our systems and our marketing by asking questions like: Which ads actually bring in paying customers? Where do orders stall? What makes someone trust us with the only copy of their family's memories?

The system we run on today came out of those questions. Customers get an instant estimate, place an order, and follow it from the day their media leaves home to the day it comes back. I can see where every order came from and where it stands, without digging through paperwork.

Since it went live in May, revenue has grown about 10% a month, and estimates and orders are both up.

What I value most about John is his judgment. He has taken the time to understand how we really work, and he has always been candid about how we can improve the customer experience and keep growing. He has also kept up with every change in his field over the years, including the newest AI tools, and brought them into my business as they proved themselves. Each one has made my marketing dollars work harder.

I was referred to John when Pinch was still just an idea. I'm a surgeon. I knew the medicine, and I knew what patients wanted. What I didn't know was market size, building a go-to-market plan, or how to work with developers to get a working proof of concept off the ground. John did, so he was one of the first people I brought in.

He didn't tell me what I wanted to hear. He was skeptical at first, pressure-tested the concept with people who knew the industry, and committed only once he believed in it. Then he did the work: the market research and the financial models. Together we built the plans for reaching patients and recruiting providers. He got our first site and booking experience into the market, and he stayed with us from launch through our seed round and beyond.

Pinch is now venture-backed and operating in ten markets. A lot of people helped build that. John was there before almost any of them, and the thinking he did and his contributions over the first two years still show in how we operate today.

I met John in 1996 through a close friend and advisor, Mark Sheer. John came to work with me in the mortgage business, and I quickly learned he was also building websites for other companies, and thinking about them differently than anyone I knew. He built our first site, LoanLink.com.

At the time there were no email marketing lists. LoanLink.com was the first mortgage website tied to the PIN ID direct-mail tracking system John and Robert Stover had invented. It could tell us exactly who was visiting the site, what they were looking at, and which loan officer should get the lead. We knew which mailing had produced which lead. Later he created the first secure online loan application connected to desktop underwriting, integrated with Calyx Point. That was 1996. The rest of the industry caught up years later.

Whenever I have a question about how technology should serve a business, John is still one of the first people I call. Thirty years on, that hasn't changed.