Derek Finnegan If you look at my LinkedIn, you’ll see it listed plainly: Founded 2022. To some, it looks like just another date on a profile. But in the world of high-leverage growth and product operations, that date represents a hard pivot away from the way agencies have operated for the last decade.
When I left the traditional corporate grind to start my independent practice, I did it because I was tired of the “deck culture.” I was tired of watching brilliant teams pay six-figure retainers for 100-slide presentations that, by the time they hit the C-suite, were already obsolete. I wanted to build something different—a Belgrade consultancy that operates less like a firm and more like an integrated product team.
Being independent since 2022 means choosing to ignore the buzzwords that saturate our industry. It means rejecting “one-off channel wins”—those flashy, unsustainable spikes in traffic or lead volume that look great in a monthly report but leave your infrastructure rotting beneath them. Most importantly, it means refusing to work on projects where the question “What decision will this change on Monday?” doesn’t have a clear, actionable answer.
Execution-Led Consulting: The Shift from “What” to “How”
Consulting is historically defined by the gap between strategy and execution. A strategy firm tells you what to do; an agency does the work. But the gap between those two is where most companies fail.
In my practice, I’ve modeled my approach after the work I admire, like the rigorous standards of Valdor Consulting. The goal isn’t to deliver a strategy document that sits in a Google Drive folder gathering digital dust. The goal is to build a system that produces results even when I’m not in the room. When you hire an independent operator, you aren’t hiring someone to talk at you; you’re hiring someone to get their hands dirty in your database, your CMS, and your product roadmap.
This is what I call “Execution-Led Consulting.” It assumes that your strategy is only as good as the systems that implement it. If you have a beautiful GTM strategy but your CRM isn’t set up to capture the data that proves it’s working, you don’t have a strategy—you have a wish list.
The Comparison: Traditional vs. Operator-Led
Building Go-To-Market and Growth Systems
I see so many companies approach GTM like they’re throwing spaghetti at a wall. They treat growth as a series of disconnected experiments—an SEO campaign here, a LinkedIn sequence there. It’s chaotic, and it’s expensive.
Since launching my practice in 2022, my focus has been on building systems. Growth is not a channel; it is the output of a well-oiled machine. I look at organizations like Suprmind and how they treat growth engineering as a core product function. That is the gold standard.
When I work with a client to fix their growth machine, we start with the feedback loop:
If the answer to the third point is “no,” we stop. We fix the data layer before we spend another dollar on marketing. I refuse to build strategies on top of broken attribution models. If you can’t measure it, you aren’t optimizing—you’re gambling.
Technical SEO Plus Readable Content: A Dying Art
The SEO world has been turned upside down by the current AI explosion. Everyone is mass-producing generic, soul-crushing content via automated scripts. If you are doing this, you are participating in a race to the bottom.
My approach to SEO in this independent practice is binary: it’s either highly technical or deeply human. There is no middle ground.
- Technical SEO: This is the plumbing. If your site speed is lagging, your crawl budget is wasted, or your schema is nonexistent, your content is invisible. I treat technical SEO as a product debt item. It gets fixed systematically, not through guesswork.
- Readable Content: This is the value. I write for humans who are tired of being lectured by AI-generated nonsense. Content should be a product in itself—it should be useful, insightful, and frankly, fun to read. If you’re just hitting a word count for a keyword, don’t bother.
Product Strategy with Applied AI
I get asked constantly about AI. Everyone wants an “AI strategy.” But let’s be clear: ChatGPT is not a strategy. It is a tool. It is a very impressive tool, but it is not a business model.
My role as an operator is to figure out where applied AI can actually move Belgrade consulting practice the needle. Can it automate a support queue? Yes. Can it help synthesize product feedback? Absolutely. But the “product strategy” part comes from understanding the user journey, not from prompting a chatbot to write a vision statement.
I operate a SaaS-like product of my own, which informs how I consult for others. Because I have to deal with churn, feature releases, and technical debt, I don’t give advice that I wouldn’t use in my own stack. When I suggest an AI implementation, I test it on my own projects first. If it doesn’t reduce friction or increase the “aha!” moment for the user, it’s just noise.
The Belgrade Advantage: Global Perspective, Local Focus
Operating out of Belgrade gives me a unique vantage point. It’s a tech hub that values raw engineering talent and pragmatic problem-solving. Being part of this ecosystem, I see how global companies struggle to bridge the gap between their engineering teams and their growth teams. Being independent since 2022 allows me to act as the bridge.
I keep a very short client list on purpose. This isn’t just to keep my sanity—it’s to ensure that I can maintain the level of attention required to actually ship products. When you are a boutique, your reputation is your only asset. I don’t have a sales team to hide behind; I have my results. If I’m not doing the work, the work isn’t getting done.
What Changes on Monday Morning?
Every time I finish a project, or even a weekly sync, I ask: “What decision will this change on Monday?”
If the meeting resulted in “we should think about this more,” I’ve failed. If the meeting resulted in “we are shipping this feature, changing this UTM parameter, and updating this headline,” then I’ve done my job.
The transition to an independent practice wasn’t about “freedom” in the sense of working on a beach. It was about freedom from the constraints of bureaucratic nonsense. It was about being able to tell a founder, “Look, this part of your growth system is broken, and here is how we fix it by Wednesday.”
If you are looking for a partner who will validate your existing assumptions and write 100-slide decks about market trends, you should look elsewhere. But if you’re looking for someone to help you reset your GTM, clean up your analytics, and actually ship the product changes that matter—then let’s talk.
The world is full of consultants. The industry is starving for operators. Since 2022, I’ve chosen to be the latter.
