About
Ben McEachen: 28 years of building what works.
And learning from what didn't.
I'm Ben McEachen. I've spent 28 years inside companies trying to figure out why some scale gracefully and others break under their own weight. The answer is almost never about strategy or talent. It's about operational infrastructure: the processes, systems, and teams that let a business grow without reinventing itself every six months.
I spent 14 years at Havas Edge, the performance marketing arm of the global Havas network. We built media strategies for companies ranging from DTC startups to Fortune 500 enterprises, and I got to work alongside world-class talent in media, analytics, and technology. But the pattern that shaped my career had nothing to do with marketing. Our clients, brilliant founders, would build incredible products, capture market attention, and then watch their momentum slow down. Not because the market turned on them, but because their operations couldn't keep pace. I started building the systems that fixed that inside the agency. Then I shepherded a consulting practice that took what we'd learned in sales operations, logistics, and technology and brought it directly to our clients.
But that was only one chapter. I built a B2B visual communications design and manufacturing company from scratch and scaled it to profitability in two years. I joined a pre-revenue health-tech startup as COO and built international operations across three continents. I ran fractional CXO engagements for DTC brands, working with founders solving hard problems with lean resources. The thread across all of it was the same: different businesses with competing internal objectives, and the work of creating alignment and systems that could keep growing without the founder holding everything together. Not in the big company playbooks, but in the scrappy, resource-constrained reality of mid-market companies trying to scale without losing their minds.
"Then AI changed the math. Production costs started collapsing across every industry I work in. The firms that restructured around the new economics pulled ahead. The ones that kept pricing the old way started losing ground. Almost nobody was helping operators figure out what to actually do about it."— Ben McEachen
So I started designing workflows that incorporated AI into real business operations. I deployed self-hosted AI agents, designed industry-specific systems, and published what I learned along the way. The operators didn't need another strategy deck or another tool vendor. They needed someone who could see the cost compression pattern, design the operational response, and get it working.
How I think about this work
I believe operational guidance should come from someone who has actually built operations. Not someone who studied them from the outside or created frameworks based on what should work in theory.
I lead with learning, not credentials. I write about what I'm figuring out, not what I've figured out. The articles on this site are as much about the mistakes and surprises as they are about the solutions. That's not false modesty. It's what makes the advice useful.
If you're an operator dealing with similar challenges, or just following the same questions, I'd be glad to hear from you.