About
Daniell Robertson
Husband, father, builder. The capacity to figure it out is the only thing worth compounding.
Made in England, assembled in America. I've come to think of my life in two volumes, and the hinge between them fell at eighteen, on a fifty-fifty. I'd grown up in the professional football (aka soccer) system in England, signed schoolboy forms at fifteen, trained full-time at Birmingham City from sixteen, and played against the likes of Manchester United and Arsenal. I was fifty-fifty for a full professional contract, and I just missed out. The safe move was to stay and keep chasing the part-time version of the dream. Instead I took a scholarship to a country I'd set foot in just once, as a boy on a family trip, and started over. I've been choosing like that ever since.
America gave me more than the plan ever would have. A full ride to Rollins College. Three-time All-American, twice the conference's defensive player of the year, the Hall of Fame, a last run for Great Britain at the Summer Universiade in Bangkok, and two degrees on the way through. None of it was the plan at eighteen. The plan fell through. The actual version was better, and I couldn't have designed it if I'd tried.
Then I spent the better part of two decades in business development, strategic partnerships and alliances, and go-to-market, from early-stage startups to publicly traded technology companies, and from angel investing and advising through to being part of a multi-hundred-million-dollar acquisition.
The industry was digital advertising, which exists to remove friction: to make the purchase effortless, the next video autoplay, the want predicted before you feel it. I was good at it. Then I started to see what a life with all the friction removed does to a person. Now I work on the opposite problem: putting the right friction back, the productive kind that builds the capacity to choose for yourself.
The part that made the rest of it make sense was the hardest. In the span of fifty-nine days I lost my mum and my younger brother, Thomas. Mum first. Thomas after. I stopped drinking the day he died and I haven't had one since. I count the days (1,580 today). I always count.
Grief stripped away every system I'd built to feel in control. What was left underneath was the capacity to be okay when control isn't available.
My wife, Alexandra, and I own Ertson Group, our family holding company. We have two daughters, Adalyn (Addie) and Kinsley (Kins). The years took us through San Francisco and New York, where Addie was born, before we came home to Orlando, the one corner of America I'd seen as a child and never imagined I'd live in. Everything I build now passes through one question: does this make our family stronger? It's a real test, and plenty of good ideas fail it.
These days I build the work around the family, not the family around the work. It took me a long time, and one unbearable stretch, to learn the order. I'm not going back. We've concentrated our life on purpose: fewer things, more of myself in each.
I've always been relentlessly curious, the kind who can't leave a good question alone. What I do with the answers is kaizen, a word I picked up long ago: a little better today than yesterday, on purpose, and never quite finished. Curiosity finds the better question. The small, repeated work earns the answer.
The thing underneath all of it I call agency: the practiced capacity to see what's being chosen for you, and to choose for yourself. The work of a grown-up is to build it back, in the rooms that actually hold a life: your health, your work and money, your people. It took me years to name what was going on. I write here so it takes the people reading, and two of them in particular, a good deal less.
That's the second reader I'm always writing for, the one who won't subscribe for years yet. In the end, this is a father authoring his own life in the open, so that Addie and Kins can one day read the whole record and make of it what they want.
— Daniell
What sits underneath
This site is the personal layer. Underneath are the operating entities:
- Middle 3rd Solutions (M3S), a fractional Chief Business Development Officer (CBDO) practice for privately held firms from $5M to $50M+. Its local practice, Marketegy, brings the same thinking to marketing strategy for local businesses under $5M.
- Confidently Curious, a parenting philosophy where struggle is safe, a letter for parents, and a children's story world.
Part of Ertson Group, a family holding company.