Today we’d like to introduce you to Yates Jarvis.
Hi Yates, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I have been enjoying the worlds of both math and art for as long as I can remember. I chose a liberal arts education at Wake Forest in lieu of a math-oriented focus at MIT as means for developing more of the human-side of problem solving. This itch culminated educationally at Case Western Reserve’s Weatherhead School of Management via a Masters focused on strategy, transformation, and change management – complex human-intertwined math.
Vocationally, this began to manifest itself in the use of technologies to solve business problems. I found myself as a middleman dipping deeply into both and encouraging better communication and synergy between them. From Blackbaud, E Solutions (purchased by WOW!), and Major League Baseball sabermetrics firm Scout Advisor (exited), software was a focus that ended up making way to the marketing side of technology at Qorvis and E House Studio which pushed my inquiry into business needs even further. At E House, for example, seeing the differences between design and “Design” with a capital D meant seeing the differences between performing tasks and inquiring more pointedly at needs and goals to uncover outcome-maximizing objectives and strategies. A driving force of my growth in understanding the import of team dynamics in accomplishing business objectives prior to my Masters in Org Development at CWRU was through my mentor Rick Quinn, VP Emeritus of Transformation for Sears. Also formational was the communication leadership of another mentor, Tony Diekemper, then CEO of Skyline Technologies prior to his tenure at Rampart.
In 2017, I left E House and started my own firm, 2 Visions, with a hope of taking transformation, org development, and change out of the world of HR alone and utilizing it within execution on the back of strategy formation and strategic management for my clients – particularly focusing on helping ecommerce businesses. And yes, the 2 Visions is all about math and art, but imagined more contextually in my consulting work as economic vision and people vision. Now, having won myriad awards on the back of successfully growing hundreds of millions of dollars via a $1B+ portfolio of ecommerce revenue under management, I’ve been able to enjoy the decades of effort to develop an approach that just plain works- orchestrating the math and the art of business so that they can play ball better together!
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
I learned intimately from my career up through to launching 2 Visions … and have expensive scars, so to speak, to show for it. Those lessons-learned completely shaped our winning approach. For instance, I knew from experience that companies just did not implement third party recommendations well when those recommendations were delivered en masse and without longer term assistance in follow-through. I also knew that complex change initiatives were more likely to fail than succeed, by quite a margin. Having walked the walk on all of this for many years, I was able to develop a conviction that totally changes how we go about helping our clients. That conviction is this: I have to be available and present to directly help my clients over the long haul – no junior staff, no project managers to replace my direct connection – if I wanted to help companies successfully navigate exponential growth, I needed to be there all along the way. This of course limits the number of clients with whom we can work, and it limits our own growth potential. But it’s the work I love and when the results are there over and over again it feels like a calling of sorts.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your business?
2 Visions is an award-winning strategy, marketing, and research firm. We help ecommerce companies achieve significant 2x to 10x growth by developing their in-house capabilities for long-term success.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://2visions.org
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yatesjarvis/
