A Look Back:  A Year of Progress

You should follow me on twitter here:@seanMeverett

It’s the end of the first decade of the 2000s and it got me thinking that every year at this time most people think back at the previous year and make resolutions about the things they want to change in the new year.  Well, while most people are looking backwards, I’m looking forward.

I’ve never made resolutions because I live with no regrets.  In the fall of 1999 I let one opportunity slip me by, and subsequently made a promise that I would never miss another.  Since then, if I’ve ever wanted to do something or was curious about how something worked, I didn’t ask how, I jumped right in and started doing and researching.

A decade later, I’m now still pushing forward, but paused to think about the most productive year I’ve ever had.  Since I’m a numbers guy, lets take a look at some of the accomplishments in numeric terms

• 2 Days The website you’re viewing right now took me one weekend to create, from buying the domain name, uploading WordPress, installing plugins, Search Engine Optimization, and all the Design, it took two full days. If you’re looking for a quick website with blog functionality and social media interlaced, I can help, just contact me for more information. UPDATE: my site was featured in Web Design Ledger’s Top 50 Inspiring Portfolio Designs, wooo!
• 1/2 of Top 5 I completed exactly one-half of the MBA program at a top five business school, The University of Chicago, which incidentally was renamed The Booth School of Business after David Booth’s record-setting $300 million donation!
• 2 for 2 I started two other businesses this year, Carbon Rabbit, a technology lifestyle blog, and Evolyte, a marketing services firm, which I co-founded with two lifelong friends.
• Alpha 2.0 & $500,000 I developed and instituted the open-source, high-frequency trading competition, lovingly named the  Alpha 2.0 Challenge at the other firm I founded in 2007, BlueStone Investments.  We are working with the winning team now to paper trade, optimize, and implement with up to $500,000 into the live market.
• 18 is the number of hours per day that I work.  Managing three businesses, business school, and a management consulting role keeps me working from 7am to midnight.  Every.  Single.  Day.
• 1 new firm. I’m in the process of managing the integration of all the tools, templates, and methodologies for the EC practice of Towers Watson, the result of the Watson Wyatt and Towers Perrin merger.

I’m an Entrepreneur

I build while others sleep, spend nearly all my free time on the internet (have pretty much given up watching TV), and start businesses as a hobby.  I love giving advice, am a perpetual student of marketing, and crave discovering patterns within data.

I’m always on the lookout for a way to exploit an epiphany into profit, but enjoy spending my free time working out and watching movies.

I’ve always believed that coupling a broad range of knowledge about many topics and extremely deep technical expertise in a few topics will ultimately allow myself to identify actionable insights that can drive value creation.  That’s just a fancy way of saying, “know a lot so you can do a lot”.

My Professional Background/Bio

Sean is dedicated to leveraging cutting-edge academic research in the areas of marketing and behavioral economics, and is instrumental in operationalizing Evolyte’s strategy.  Sean is also the conceptual Founder, President and Chief Executive Officer of BlueStone Investments, a proprietary algorithmic trading shop.  His professional experience includes retail operations management, management consulting, and investment management. Sean graduated from the University of Iowa with a BS in mathematics with an emphasis in Actuarial Science, including minors in both Business and Statistics. He will soon be graduating from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business with concentrations in Marketing, Analytical Finance, and Entrepreneurship.

No project I embark on is done without careful thought and consideration, including this website.

Take for instance the typeface used in each of the heading graphics, which is called Gotham.  It was originally commissioned by GQ (yes, the magazine) whose editors wanted to display a sans serif with a “geometric structure” that would look “masculine, new, and fresh”.  Accordingly, I chose this to reflect the same sort of underlying feel to this website. Besides, if it’s good enough for the cornerstone of Freedom Tower on the World Trade Center site and Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, then it’s darn sure good enough for me.

From extremely granular design items to holistic business strategy development, I provide the same level of love, care, and commitment to each element of a project.

I believe that to be successful one must not only spend 10 years actively performing at the deepest levels of expertise (as suggested in Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers), but that in order to implement ideas efficiently you must spend 50% of your time reading, researching, and learning, then 20% hypothesizing, another 20% testing, and 10% iterating.

To that end, I follow nearly 100 industry related blogs with over 500 posts per day covering social media, analytics, technology, design, entrepreneurship, and marketing.  Of those 500 posts, I typically skim about 100, fully read 25 to 50, and save approximately 5 of the highest quality and actionable posts to Instapaper so I can access anytime.

Then, once I’ve got a handle on the continuum of knowledge, I bring it all together and start sketching the ideas that have been swirling around in my head.  Finally, with a little elbow grease and some teamwork, we’re able to produce a first iteration that’s 90% closer to the end product right out of the gate than any of our competition.

I don’t take vacations; work is my vacation.  I don’t settle for anything less than “perfection”.  And my goal is to think about a problem from every possible angle before making a move.  Join me in my quest for discovery and optimization…

Builders need tools, and am continually on the lookout for the holy grail of apps that allows me to do everything I need in one complete platform.  Sadly, I doubt this “God app” will be developed anytime soon (maybe I’ll start on that project next).  So in the meantime, I’m using the items below to work more efficiently and effectively.

Microsoft Office

• Excel: arrays, vlookups, pivots, dynamic charting, Macros, model building, Monte Carlo simulation
• PowerPoint: Board-level summary writing, gorgeous layouts, charts, and graphs
• Word: memo writing, engagement letters, opinion letters, issue analysis

MATLAB

• Self-Taught: taught myself the programming language in one weekend with no formal coding education
• Toolboxes: Datafeed, Neural Network, Optimization, Spreadsheet Link, Statistics, and custom code
• Uses: high-frequency algorithmic trading (historical back-testing, algorithm development, simulation, etc.)

Firefox

• Web Apps: I use a multitude of web apps and access them all through Firefox’s advanced web browser
• Plugins, Add-Ons, Extensions, User Scripts: I’m a big user of Firefox’s advanced features and use them for visual effects, Gmail, code editing/debugging, SEO, Cloud Computing (AWS), and GTD (Getting Things Done)

WordPress & Photoshop

• WordPress Theme Customization: whether free or advanced paid themes, I edit the CSS and HTML to customize to my and my client’s desired look and feature set, including Social Media links
• Photoshop: like they say, a picture is worth a thousand words, and visuals truly are the best ways to communicate concepts, especially when they are complex.  As you might have guessed, the icons and graphics for this website took quite some time to put together, but will likely keep playing with them so check back often!

Tweetdeck

• Twitter: I manage four twitter accounts, one personal and three for my businesses
• Facebook: I also manage multiple Facebook pages for myself and businesses through Tweetdeck
• LinkedIn: you can’t be a professional without having a LinkedIn profile

See the Social Media section below to connect with me from various social media platforms

Apple

It’s no secret that I love Apple products and have shouted my disdain for Windows from the rooftops for quite some time.  Unfortunately, as I write this, the iPad 3G = Wi-Fi isn’t available for purchase until March 2010.  I don’t think I can wait that long… .  In the meantime, here’s a list of the Apple products I use every day (and one I hacked to at least run their operating system and software):

• iPad Wi-Fi + 3G: coming soon!
• iPhone 3GS: I have 13 email accounts, follow nearly 100 blogs, read over 400 posts, and follow hundreds of relevant Twitter-ers.  Without my iPhone, I simply couldn’t slog through all this noise and pick out the most relevant nuggets.
• 13″ Macbook Pro: I’m constantly running around the city of Chicago and flying all over the country.  If there were a fire, this would be the first and only thing of importance that I would grab.  This is one of four computers I own, the most recent being a Dell Mini 10V Netbook, which I Hackintoshed to run the Mac OS X Snow Leopard operating system, and will now become my ultra-portable of choice around the city.
• iomega 500GB External HDD: I have so much proprietary and intellectual capital that I back my files up in no less than 6 locations — this external hard drive and Apple’s TimeMachine, Dropbox, mobileme, and various FTP accounts in each of the domains I own.
• 24″ LED Cinema Display: I need a lot of screen real estate when I’m really getting productive and this gorgeous screen with seamless integration to my Macbook is just the ticket.
• Peripherals: no desktop would be complete without Apple’s wireless keyboard, new Magic Mouse, and new aluminum remote.
• Apple iPhone Dock: this is no longer on sale, and I purchased a few years back, but the bass in this thing is out of this world.  Whether next to the pool, or streaming a digital movie, this is the best sound I’ve found in such a small package

Have a look at my Portfolio above to see some of this magic in action!

Well, here we are.  The most overused word from 2009:  Social Media.  Nevertheless, if you’d like to connect with me other than filling out the Contact form below, feel free to check out my multiple Twitter accounts, Facebook pages, Biznik and Sprouter profiles, Digg, StumbleUpon, and the list goes on, whew!

You know the drill.  Fill out each of the elements and it will shoot over to one of my 13 inboxes faster than you can say, well, something that’s really fast.

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