About What I Do AI Contact
Matt Klein · Principal

Twenty years running, fixing, and scaling ecommerce businesses. Two of my own, both exited. Hundreds of millions in revenue managed.

Now I build the systems, human and artificial, that help leadership teams capture what the rest of the market misses.

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About
“

Making businesses simpler, more profitable, and harder to compete with.

— the common thread

I Have Been the Person
in the Seat.

Two businesses built and sold. Hundreds of millions in ecommerce revenue managed across every major channel. I know what breaks when you scale, because I have been the one holding it together.

Not theory. Not frameworks from a slide deck. Pattern recognition built across multiple brands, multiple channels, and multiple economic cycles. The kind of knowledge that only comes from doing the work, not advising on it.

Today I split my time between running ecommerce and AI strategy for a multi-brand consumer goods company and advising founders and leadership teams through 3rd Deviation. The common thread is making complex businesses simpler, more profitable, and harder to compete with.

Scope of Services

The Work Takes the Shape It Needs To.

Some engagements are a twelve-week AI systems build. Sometimes it is a single morning in a conference room helping a founder decide whether to fire their agency. Sometimes it is redirecting a million dollars of advertising spend. Sometimes it is pulling a brand out of a bad channel before the losses compound. Sometimes it is rebuilding a team that is pointed at the wrong targets.

The thread is operational judgment, earned across hundreds of millions of revenue managed. Twenty years teaches you which parts of the business are load-bearing and which are noise. The tools change every two years. The load-bearing parts never do.

What I Do

I Build the Machine,
Not Just the Parts.

Strategy

Ecommerce Systems Design

Channel strategy, profitability architecture, and operational infrastructure across Amazon, Walmart, DTC, wholesale, and emerging marketplaces. I connect the math across every channel so you know where the real margin lives.

Profitability

Dollar Allocation and Margin

Where the money is going, and what it is actually earning. I rebuild pricing architecture, redirect ad spend, assess agency contracts, and connect channel math across the operation. Most ecommerce businesses leak margin in three or four places at once because nothing in their stack looks across all of them.

Intelligence

AI Implementation

Not AI as a buzzword. AI as operational infrastructure. Demand forecasting that recalibrates itself. Content systems that generate channel-ready copy across a dozen platforms from one source of truth. Analytics that deliver the insight, not just the dashboard. I build AI that your team actually runs, daily.

Leadership

Organizational Clarity

I have managed teams through rapid scaling, leadership transitions, and the operational chaos that comes with fast growth. I help companies build the team structure, reporting cadence, and accountability system where execution matches ambition.

My Work

What It Looks Like in Practice.

A multi-brand consumer goods portfolio, roughly 1,600 SKUs across Amazon, Walmart, DTC, and wholesale, had outgrown the infrastructure its team was using to run it. Forecasting was guesswork. Content was a bottleneck. Contribution margin across channels was invisible. Over twelve months I built the layer underneath.

  • A live profitability engine that recalculates across eight channels on a single assumption change
  • A rolling 13-month demand forecast at the SKU level, stockout-corrected
  • A content system that generates channel-ready copy across a dozen platforms from one catalog
  • Reporting that reads live data and drafts its own narrative for leadership

The systems compound. Each cycle, they get sharper.

The Edge

AI Built Around the Problem,
Not the Other Way Around.

The AI systems most consultants pitch look impressive in a demo and collect dust in production. I build the opposite. Every system I ship starts with a specific operational problem. A margin leak no one can see across eight channels. A forecast that stockouts keep distorting. A content queue that should generate itself. A reporting cadence that should write its own narrative. A pricing decision that needs to recalculate when a single assumption changes.

The AI is what closes the gap between what leadership wants to see and what the team can actually produce. The outcome is not "we have AI now." The outcome is faster decisions, cleaner margin, and a team that stops doing the work a machine should have been doing six months ago.

The systems learn. Every correction compounds. Domain knowledge deepens. What starts as a tool becomes an intelligence layer that improves with every cycle your team runs. That is the real moat, and it is something your competitors are not building because they cannot ship it.

Margin leak across channels
Forecast distorted by stockouts
Content queue bottleneck
Reporting that lags decisions
Pricing that cannot recalculate
3D
Profitability, recalculated on one click
SKU-level forecast, stockout-corrected
Channel-ready copy, generated daily
Reporting that writes its own narrative
Pricing engine that moves with assumptions

One intelligence layer. Problems in. Outcomes out.

A few projects recently shipped
  • Profitability analysis across 8+ channels — recalculates on a single assumption change
  • Demand forecasting at the SKU level, corrected for stockout distortion
  • Product content generated for every channel from one catalog
  • Leadership reporting that reads live data and drafts its own narrative
  • AI-generated product photography and video from existing catalog images
How I Work

Flexible by Design.

Every engagement looks different because every business is different. The constant is the approach. Understand the real problem. Build something that works immediately. Leave you in a stronger position than where we started.

01

Strategic Advisory

Ongoing partnership for founders and leadership teams navigating channel expansion, profitability optimization, or operational complexity. I become the person you call before you make the big decisions.

02

Systems Build

A defined engagement to design and build specific operational infrastructure. Profitability models, forecasting systems, content engines, reporting automation. Delivered, documented, transferred.

03

Interim Leadership

Step in as fractional or interim VP or SVP of Ecommerce during transitions, expansions, or critical periods. I have done the job. I can do it for you while you find the right permanent hire. Or become one.

04

Executive Diagnosis

A focused engagement to assess your current ecommerce operation, identify where margin is leaking, and deliver a clear roadmap. Often this is where we start.

Fit

The Work Is Not for Everyone.

A good fit
  • Consumer brands doing $10M to $100M+ that have outgrown their current ecommerce infrastructure
  • Companies selling across multiple channels that cannot see profitability clearly across all of them
  • Leadership teams that want AI in their operations, not just on their roadmap
  • Founders who need a strategic partner, not another vendor
Not the right fit
  • You need someone to manage your Amazon ads or build a Shopify store
  • You want a strategy presentation that lives in a drawer
  • You want the work done with AI kept out of it
  • You want your decisions confirmed, not pressure-tested
The Name

Why 3rd Deviation?

In statistics, the third standard deviation captures the rarest 0.3% of outcomes. Most of the market clusters around the mean, running the same playbook, hiring the same agencies, optimizing the same metrics. The compounding returns live at the edges, where the thinking is different and the systems are built to learn. That is what this practice is built to find.

Let's Talk.

No pitch deck. No discovery questionnaire. Just a real conversation about your business, what is working, what is not, and whether I can help.

Start a Conversation
Contact

This Kicks Off With a Real Conversation.

Thirty minutes. No pitch deck. No discovery questionnaire. We figure out if there is a fit, or we do not. Either way you leave with something useful.

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Got it. Talk soon.

You'll hear back within 24 hours. Not from a bot. From me.

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Or email directly: matt@3rddeviation.com