Every Detour Compounds

Two tracks

My professional career seems like a straight line, that is if you actually take the time to zoom out. Tech consulting → in-house consulting → engineering. Ten years in the same lane: understanding business systems and making them work better.

But alongside that career, I had a second track. The side ventures. Courses on investing and trading. A deep dive into fitness. Two blogs. Info products that never sold. A blockchain rabbit hole. Digital marketing experiments.

The professional track gave me depth. The side track gave me range. And now, building AI automation systems for businesses, both show up in everything I do.

The consulting years

I studied Business Administration for my bachelor’s, then specialized with a Master’s in Finance & Investments. Back at that time, it felt like I was starting to get a clearer view on which career path I wanted to pursue. However, as soon as I started interviewing at consulting firms, it became clear there were far more specializations than I expected. A finance degree didn’t narrow things down. It opened them up. I had no clear idea what function or industry I’d work best in. But I always knew one thing: I like to dive into the details. That’s what led me to ERP implementation in 2016. It sits right at the intersection of business and technology, and it’s all details.

Big implementations. Large teams, multiple countries, structured processes.

What consulting teaches you is how to communicate with stakeholders. How to take something complex and make it understandable for someone who has 15 minutes and needs to make a decision. How to read a room and know when to push and when to listen.

It also teaches you what doesn’t work. I watched meticulously designed blueprints become outdated before they were implemented. I saw six-month plans that didn’t survive first contact with reality. I learned that the bigger the upfront design, the bigger the gap between what you planned and what actually happened.

That lesson stuck.

The side ventures

Then there was the other track. I always had the itch to build something of my own.

Investing and trading came first. I spent real money on courses, tools, subscriptions. Studied the material, consumed hundreds of hours of content, yet I never meaningfully committed to it. I was always preparing.

Then fitness. Deep dive, same energy, same pattern. Research, plan, never turn it into anything.

Then digital marketing. I got two blogs live. One on squash and padel, one on exponential technologies, like AI. I built info products, marketing funnels, and created social media content. Result: some ad revenue, no sales. I invested time, money, energy, yet I never earned real money from any of it.

Each time, the pattern was identical: research everything, see all the pitfalls, design the perfect approach, and get stuck in an endless loop of preparation. I told myself I was being thorough. I was actually procrastinating.

What these failures taught me was simple but brutal: talking to the market beats talking to yourself. Every hour I spent perfecting a plan was an hour I didn’t spend finding out if anyone actually wanted what I was building.

The engineering shift

When I moved from a consulting role to an engineering role, something clicked.

In consulting, you’re the expert. You walk in with answers. You assess, recommend, present. It’s top-down. You’re expected to know.

In engineering, you’re a tinkerer. You look at a problem, try something, see what happens, adjust. You don’t need to know everything upfront. You need to be comfortable not knowing and figuring it out as you go.

That shift changed how I approach everything now. Problems aren’t things to be solved in theory. They’re things to be poked at, tested, iterated on. The 80/20 rule became my operating principle: get the 80% that matters out the door, and the last 20% will reveal itself through use.

The AI chapter

When I started exploring AI at the end of 2023, the technology was honestly not great. Building a simple chatbot with a Slack integration required a ridiculous patchwork of tools. But I wasn’t interested in the hype. I was interested in the business application. What can this actually do for a company’s operations?

Automation was more established, so that’s where I started. Consulting taught me how businesses operate. Systems implementation showed me how everything connects. My finance background made me think in ROI. And engineering gave me the tinkering mindset to just build and iterate. Put that together, and I could solve real problems. Fast.

That’s the compounding at work. No single skill got me here. The combination did.

Why this matters

If you’re reading this and you’ve got abandoned side projects, half-finished courses, or skills that don’t seem to connect to what you do now, I’d argue you’re not behind. You’re accumulating.

The consulting skills I thought were separate from engineering? They’re how I communicate with clients now. The blogs that never earned money? They taught me that the market doesn’t care about your plan. The finance degree I barely use directly? It’s why I think about every project in terms of ROI and hours saved, not just technical elegance. And of course how I make sense of all the finance lingo.

Every detour deposited something. And at some point, the deposits start compounding.

The uncomfortable truth

I won’t pretend I planned this. I didn’t sit down in 2016 and map out a path from finance to ERP consulting to engineering to AI automation. Each step felt like a pivot at the time. Sometimes even like a sidestep, but always my curiosity was far greater than my will to look like an expert.

The only constant was the underlying drive: I wanted to make things work better. More efficiently. Less manual chaos. Whether that was a multi-country ERP rollout or my own proposal process, the motivation was the same.

If you have that same itch, the one that makes you look at a broken process and think “there has to be a better way”, you’re sitting on more raw material than you think.

You just haven’t compounded it yet.