Hi. I’m Aaron Vance, founder and the one full-time employee of the company.
My personal expertise comes initially from adapting academic training in statistical analysis and research development (from two years spent in an Ivy-League PhD program in psychology, and two years working in another program in government and economics) to business.
In the beginning I made the same mistakes a lot of academic analysts make: trying to conduct a "proper" regression analysis in a business context. Not only isn’t there time or resources to go through all of the checking that regression assumptions have been met and the rest of the academic approach, but it often wouldn’t even be appropriate with secondary, aggregated, and often modeled data, with thousands of data points instead of dozens, in a rapidly changing market place, etc.
I was able to hone my predictive modeling skills and segmentation skills through many hundreds of modeling projects, many of which involved getting the results of, for example, the direct mail test. It became clear over time how to combine the useful elements of the academic tradition and the business tradition (working with analysts who have been trained in the business and attending DMA seminars on statistical analysis) in predictive modeling.
I have also developed and/or run about 50-60 research projects and been involved in some way in about 100. I have programmed, managed, or been otherwise involved in hundreds of Web site development projects. I have a lot of experience in these three areas and hopefully have learned all along the way and will continue to.
I work with a wide range of partners, some of whom I list on the site, and have hired many dozens of contractors over the years. In fact I have thought a lot about how to successfully find a good contractor from craigslist.org and this approach seems to have held up when I’ve used it recently and for clients I’ve recommended it to.
