Introducing the “fractal digital fixer”

- or what some pirates actually do for a living

Two months ago, I wrote about leaving the Navy to become a pirate. Here's what piracy actually looks like - for me at least.

Last month, a company reached out. They'd spent three months trying to find the right agency partner to help them with their platform. 

They'd talked to agencies, sat through cases, made spreadsheets comparing skill sets. 

Nothing clicked. 

They were stuck, the project was stuck, business was “unhappening”.

Two conversations later, I connected them with the right partner. 

Deal done. 

Problem solved.

And this wasn't a one-off. 

It's become the pattern.

Someone's analytics stack won't align. A vendor relationship isn't working. A vendor needs the right partners in a market. An implementation failed and nobody knows why. 

The internal team has tried all the usual “stuff” and “things”. 

Then someone mentions my name.

I show up, and more often than not manage to diagnose what's actually wrong (usually different from what is normally wrong), and either fix it with them or find the person, tool or partner who can.

Maybe not “easy-peasy”, but kind of close

Turns out, when you raise the black flag and sail fractal, you don't just gain freedom. 

You become something the market desperately needs but doesn't have a name for yet.

A fixer.

What the Navy can't teach you

Corporate life trains you to be excellent within boundaries. You learn the org chart, the approved vendor list, the budget cycle, the escalation path. 

These constraints become invisible after a while, you forget they're even there.

You learn to stay in your lane.

But something happens when you leave.

You see patterns the Navy never could. 

You've worked across enough organizations to know that "the analytics implementation problem" is almost never actually about analytics. 

It's about unclear requirements, misaligned stakeholders, or teams who picked a solution before understanding the problem, because that’s just how we do things…

You build a network the Navy never would. Your value isn't locked inside one company's hierarchy. 

You know the landscape, which agencies actually deliver, which consultants are worth their rate, which problems can be solved internally vs. when you need outside help.

You develop judgment the Navy never rewarded. 

In corporate life, playing it safe is rational. 

As a pirate, your reputation is everything. You learn to say no to bad fits and yes to problems that genuinely need solving.

The irony is of course that everything that made me valuable as “an employee”, strategic thinking, pattern recognition, execution capability, is 10x more valuable in the open market. 

I just needed to reset the constraints to see it.

The fixer's advantage

Traditional consultants sell time and methodology. Vendors sell products. Employees sell loyalty and availability.

Fixers sell something else entirely, velocity to resolution.

Organizations, vendors and agencies call when:

• Their internal team is stuck

• Traditional consulting isn't working

• Vendor relationships have soured

• They've already tried the obvious solutions

They don't want a three-month discovery process. They don't want a 50-slide deck. 

They want someone who's seen this movie before, knows where it goes, and can cut straight to what actually works.

But this only works because of the fractal position. 

I'm not selling a particular methodology or product. I'm not trying to maximize billable hours. 

My value comes from seeing across domains, analytics, implementation, vendor landscape, organizational dynamics, and connecting the dots faster than people locked into single perspectives can.

The platform example? 

I wasn't the best expert for that platform. 

I wasn't even involved in the implementation. 

But I knew what good implementations look like, I knew which partners specialize in what, and I understood what the client actually needed vs. what they said they needed.

That's the fixer's advantage. 

Not deeper expertise. Wider context.

Why this role didn't exist before

Twenty years ago, this position couldn't exist. 

The maritime chart of business technology was simple enough that internal teams could navigate it. 

The vendor landscape was manageable. 

Implementations followed predictable patterns.

Today, the seas are different.

The martech landscape alone has more than 11,000+ solutions. Every vendor claims they're "easy to implement" and "integrate with everything." 

Every consultant has a framework. 

Every implementation is supposedly "best in class."

Now they even have AI to supercharge everything.

But here's the truth nobody likes to say out loud, most organizations are drowning in choices and failing at execution.

They've got the budget and the smart people. 

What they don't have is someone who's seen enough implementations fail to know why they fail, and more importantly, how to avoid repeating the same mistakes.

The fixer role exists in the gap between what companies think they need (another consultant, another tool, another vendor) and what they actually need (someone who's charted these waters before).

The economics of being indispensable

The Navy taught me to be valuable. Piracy taught me to be indispensable.

Here's the difference:

Valuable: You're good at your job. You hit your KPIs. You're promotable. But you're also replaceable, the system is designed to keep working without you.

Indispensable: You solve problems that only exist outside the system. Problems that emerge when standard approaches fail. Problems where the stakes are high and the client has already wasted time and money on wrong turns.

The client that couldn't find the right partner? 

They'd already burned three months. 

Every week of delay meant lost revenue from campaigns they couldn't properly track. When I connected them with the right partner in one conversation, I didn't just save them time. I unlocked the value they were already trying to create.

That's indispensable.

And the economics reflect it. 

You're not competing on hourly rates or retainer fees. You're competing on outcomes and velocity. The client isn't thinking "can we get someone cheaper?" They're hopefully thinking "how fast can this person make our problem go away?"

Have a situation you need to go away, feel free to reach out, because most likely, I can fix it. 

But before you reach out, consider for 3 minutes how much this problem is currently costing you - and then let’s talk.

You can find me at steen@steen.fyi.