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MinMaxers

Selected work

Proof, with the attribution attached.

Six situations where the expensive problem was not where it appeared to be. Clients are anonymized unless they have approved being named, and every result states whose engagement produced it.

How to read these

Results labeled MinMaxers engagement were delivered through MinMaxers. Results labeled forward-deployed engagement came through Riley’s work with Alpha Victor at Altitude Ventures. Results labeled operating career were produced in a prior full-time role. We keep these separate on purpose — the track record is strong enough without blurring them.

HealthcareRiley as Director of Technology & Data Operations

PE-backed multi-location orthopedic urgent care group

Paid media was buying the wrong patients, and nobody could prove it

Situation

A private-equity-backed urgent care group was spending steadily on paid channels while the analytics function ran on spreadsheets. Marketing reported conversions. Operations reported that the leads were not worth much. Both were right.

Constraint

Nothing connected an ad click to what the resulting patient was actually worth, so bidding optimized toward whichever conversion was cheapest to produce. Meanwhile the reporting layer that would have exposed the gap was manual, slow, and trusted by almost nobody.

Intervention

Rebuilt acquisition around return on ad spend rather than raw conversion volume, and replaced spreadsheet analytics with an integrated data ecosystem connected to parent-company infrastructure. Separately rebuilt the website, local search presence, and conversion pathways, and automated the record and claims ingestion that staff had been doing by hand.

Outcome

reduction in paid acquisition cost

62%

reduction in paid acquisition cost

improvement in lead quality

30–100%

improvement in lead quality

annual labor cost removed

$200K

annual labor cost removed

further annual savings from ingestion automation

$45K

further annual savings from ingestion automation

reduction in claims overdue past 60 days

83%

reduction in claims overdue past 60 days

site traffic growth / warm lead growth

4x / 27x

site traffic growth / warm lead growth

What matters

The marketing problem and the data problem were the same problem. Fixing either one alone would have produced a fraction of the result.

HealthcareForward-deployed engineering engagement via Alpha Victor

Autism therapy platform

Four years of conversions, matched in three months

Situation

A multi-site therapy provider was acquiring patients through paid search with no visibility into which inquiries became long-term, high-value care relationships. The patient journey spanned a CRM and a clinical system that did not talk to each other.

Constraint

The bidding platform could only optimize toward the event it could see — a form fill — which had almost no relationship to eventual value. Everything that determined whether a lead mattered happened downstream, in systems the ad platform never received signal from.

Intervention

Mapped the full patient journey across both systems and built a value-weighted funnel so that acquisition could optimize against long-term value rather than form submissions. Paired it with a website and navigation overhaul, service-area clarity, and cleanup of the internal automations that were generating noise instead of ownership.

Outcome

revenue from 7 leads in 3 months

$170K

revenue from 7 leads in 3 months

cost per lead

~$140

cost per lead

reduction in cost per conversion

~50%

reduction in cost per conversion

weekly conversions

2x

weekly conversions

What matters

Prior to this, the same channel had produced 10 conversions over four years. The channel was never the problem — the signal it was optimizing against was.

TransportationMinMaxers engagement

Premium ground transportation operator

We refused to scale spend until the phones were fixed

Situation

A premium transportation business needed a serious digital presence and a paid acquisition program to match the quality of its service, in a market where most competitors compete on price and speed of quote.

Constraint

The demand side was the easy half. Quote response time, booking acceptance, and fleet capacity all sat upstream of whether new demand would convert into revenue — and advertising into a broken response workflow would have produced expensive proof that the channel does not work.

Intervention

Built the site, conversion architecture, and service and geographic structure first, then first-party attribution and lead routing, and only then launched paid search under explicit gating conditions. Booked revenue — not calls or clicks — became the measure of media performance. All infrastructure was built in accounts the client owns.

Outcome

client holds every account and asset

Owned

client holds every account and asset

spend scales only when response capacity does

Gated

spend scales only when response capacity does

the metric media is judged against

Booked revenue

the metric media is judged against

What matters

Marketing does not exist separately from operations. Advertising capacity you cannot fulfill is the fastest way to buy a bad reputation.

Home servicesMinMaxers engagement

High-touch home services and design firm

The competitors had instant estimators. That was the wrong pattern to copy.

Situation

A consultative, high-touch flooring and design business was being told — by its market and by conventional wisdom — to adopt the ecommerce and instant-quote patterns its larger competitors used.

Constraint

The sale genuinely depends on a consultation. An instant estimator would have converted more visitors into worse leads, filtered out exactly the customers the business is best at serving, and traded margin for volume in a business whose economics run the other direction.

Intervention

Built the conversion path around qualified consultation requests rather than instant quotes, with first-party attribution, deliberate event design, service-area search structure, and a lightweight data architecture an owner can actually operate. Paid media was scoped geographically rather than sprayed across the metro.

Outcome

technology matched to the sales model, not the category

Fit

technology matched to the sales model, not the category

tooling chosen for a small team to run unaided

Lean

tooling chosen for a small team to run unaided

lead source visible end to end

Attributed

lead source visible end to end

What matters

Technology should fit the sales model. Copying a competitor whose unit economics differ from yours is not a strategy.

ManufacturingRiley's operating career — Senior Data Product Manager & BI Lead

Large-scale manufacturing organization

Reporting across 126 facilities that finance could actually act on

Situation

A major manufacturer ran ERP-level reporting across 126 facilities on disparate systems, leaving finance and operations arguing about whose numbers were correct instead of what to do about them.

Constraint

Cost per unit was managed locally, with no reliable cross-facility view to identify which plants were structurally expensive versus temporarily unlucky.

Intervention

Directed development of integrated data infrastructure and ERP-level reporting across the network, redesigned the underlying data processes, and built an ad hoc ERP capability that replaced substantial licensed tooling. Trained roughly 530 non-technical users across accounting, finance, procurement, and operations.

Outcome

YoY reduction in conversion cost per unit

9.5%

YoY reduction in conversion cost per unit

additional annual EBIT

~$132MM

additional annual EBIT

business-unit profitability improvement

3.9x

business-unit profitability improvement

accounting close time

5 → 3 days

accounting close time

What matters

At scale, the reporting layer is not overhead. It is the mechanism by which operating decisions get made at all.

TechnologyRiley's operating career — Senior Data Product Manager

Digital gaming platform

The data team was busy and the business was unhappy

Situation

A venture-backed gaming platform had a functioning data team, a full dashboard library, and stakeholders who did not trust or use either.

Constraint

Volume was mistaken for service. More dashboards and more granularity had made the output harder to use, and every new request lengthened a queue that already took weeks to clear.

Intervention

Simplified interfaces, enriched the production datasets underneath them, cut dashboard clutter, aggregated to the granularity people actually made decisions at, and reconfigured the request process and tooling. Added observability to catch data errors before users encountered them.

Outcome

BI stakeholder satisfaction

4/10 → 9/10

BI stakeholder satisfaction

request fulfillment time

13 → 6 days

request fulfillment time

of errors caught before user impact

99%

of errors caught before user impact

What matters

Analytics teams are judged on decisions changed, not artifacts produced. Deleting dashboards improved the service.

Implementation detail is deliberately kept at the category level. The systems described here belong to the companies that paid for them, and the methods behind them are how MinMaxers earns a living.

Next step

Tell us what’s stuck and what you think it costs.

If we can move it, we’ll tell you how. If we can’t, we’ll tell you that instead — usually along with who can. Either answer is worth the conversation.