At the beginning of this year, Jim Haney tapped one of technology’s immortals—the late, great Steve Jobs—for a pithy observation to use in his email Quote of the Week series. “If you are working on something that you really care about, you don’t have to be pushed,” Jobs noted. “The vision pulls you.” The message was fitting, as it wouldn’t be long before one vision in particular guided Haney’s heart and career.
founder of Haney Strategy
Haney has spent 27 years on both sides of the office technology industry. He came up in field marketing at Ricoh, rose to global IT services responsibility at Xerox and went on to senior marketing and technology leadership for dealers including Novatech and Doceo. In April, he set out on his own in the form of Haney Strategy. The Spring Hill, Tennessee-based consultancy is built on a conviction he carried through every one of those prior seats, which is marketing, technology and AI run best as one growth engine under one senior leader.
The firm exists because of gaps Haney says he watched widen for years: sales teams and marketing teams pulling in different directions, and AI staying a keynote topic instead of becoming part of the daily work. His answer is to stay hands-on by defining the plan, then building it alongside the client’s team, right down to the copy, code and AI workflows.
The keys for me aren’t flashy. Do really good work, and take on the right work. Everything else follows from that.
— Jim Haney
In this edition of Getting to Know You, we spoke with Haney about his path through the industry, the ways he engages, from a fractional CMTO seat to team trainings and project work, and the thread he says ties it all together—finding the signal that actually moves the P&L.
ENX: You’ve held positions with companies ranging from OEMs to dealerships. Talk a little about how those experiences shaped you.
HANEY: The place to start is ESI. We had two sales divisions, a print technology group and an IT group. Two offerings, two sales teams, one company. On the IT side alone, we had a long list of partners, and every one of them wanted time with our reps. They had campaigns they believed in and real MDF dollars they wanted to invest with us. Good problems, all of them, but stack it all up and it’s a wall of noise coming at one sales organization. My job became a question I’ve been answering ever since: out of everything we could do, what is the handful of things that will actually move this business? I worked with Anthony Lane, our president, and our sales leaders to answer that over and over, and to keep two divisions reinforcing each other instead of competing for attention. I’m proud of my time at ESI. Those were special years.
That work carried me upward. What we were doing at ESI was what Xerox wanted to do globally for IT services, so the dealer seat earned me the global one. At that level you learn scale: regions, budgets, more people and more decisions in every room. I ran programs across the U.S., Canada, and Europe, and I got to work with some genuinely talented agencies along the way, even if I never stopped itching to just build things myself.
And it all started in my Lanier/Ricoh years, my ground floor: field marketing, promotions, brochures and riding along on sales calls. I’ve built campaigns from the passenger seat of a rep’s car and from a global budget line, and the lesson is the same in every room: find the people building toward the same goal, and keep ego out of the work.
ENX: Whose advice did you lean on during your formative years in the industry?
HANEY: Dan Cooper, without question. I’ve worked with and for Dan for about 15 years, and the discipline in how I work comes straight from him. He taught me to ask the second- and third-layer questions behind every good idea, not to kill it, but to find the edge cases that decide whether it succeeds. And above all, he taught me the linkage between the words in a plan and the numbers on the P&L. If they can’t be linked, it’s not a plan yet. The financials were only part of what I got from Dan. The bigger part is seeing the whole business at once, and thinking past the noise.
The other is Anthony Lane. I’ve never met anyone with a bigger heart. As president at ESI, he put people and their development first, set the standard for professionalism, and is still the best I’ve ever watched in front of a room. He was the kind of leader you wanted to go above and beyond for, and I always did. My Monday Quote of the Week is a habit I picked up from Anthony, and I’ve carried it ever since. It’s my homage to him, a tip of the hat.
ENX: What prompted you to hang your own shingle as a consultant? What do you feel makes you an effective strategist?
HANEY: After 27 years, I kept seeing the same patterns, from a Fortune 500 company to dealerships of all sizes, and they all trace back to volume. A leader today is running the core business while marketing, technology and AI all come at them at once, each with its own vendors, its own advice, and its own urgency. In that much motion, good work gets lost. Sales and marketing drift apart, and marketing pours real effort into work the P&L never feels, and that isn’t marketing’s fault. The website gets torn down and rebuilt when a new agency shows up. The CRM fills with data nobody trusts, so nobody uses it. Money goes to Google before the organic foundation is there. And AI stays on the radar, talked about, never truly put to work. Every one of those is a reasonable call made by a busy leader. They just never connect, and it adds up to motion without progress.
I started Haney Strategy to be the one who brings it together: clear out the noise, find the signal, and connect the pieces so the effort already happening starts adding up. Plenty of people will hand you a recommendation deck and wish you luck. What makes me different is I also do the doing. I stay in the work with your team, from the message to the website to the AI workflows behind it, one set of hands carrying the whole thing.
Then there’s AI. I started where most people did, on ChatGPT, writing copy and building custom GPTs, and it’s where I cut my teeth. An MIT certificate in AI gave me the technical foundation. The novelty really fell away when I got into Claude Code, working in the terminal. Not overnight. I started building small things at first, learning as I went, leaning on it a little more each week, and yes, coding. Templates turned into skills, skills into loops and agents, and piece by piece it came together as a system. That system runs my business today: the website, the research, the writing, the invoicing—all of it moves through workflows I built. And I’m still learning every day. When I advise on AI, I keep current across every major platform, but I’ve deliberately gone deep in one ecosystem, Claude and the platform Anthropic has built around it, because depth is where results come from. That’s what I teach teams: the work they already do, rebuilt on a system they understand.
ENX: Provide an overview of Haney Strategy and the services you offer. What is your target customer profile?
HANEY: The first thing I tell people is that it’s not one-size-fits-all. The centerpiece is fractional CMTO work: three, six or twelve months on retainer, usually starting at 10 hours a week, where we define up front what we’re going after, put it in a scope of work, and then I’m in your leadership meetings every week, working alongside your team. Not a report at the end of the month. A seat at the table, doing the work: the marketing, the technology and the AI, connected on purpose, because when one person owns all three, the pieces reinforce each other instead of dying in the handoffs between vendors.
Around that seat there are lighter ways in. Workshops and trainings, for a team or one-on-one, including hands-on AI training built around a person’s actual day rather than a generic curriculum. A four-week team training that takes one team’s real weekly work and rebuilds it to run with Claude, Anthropic’s AI assistant, ending with the team demoing its own workflows. Scoped projects, most often ground-up website rebuilds designed for how buyers, and now AI engines, find and evaluate a company. And for the organization that has a good team or a good agency and just needs the plan, a paid assessment that ends in a roadmap they can execute with anyone, including me.
Who do I want to serve? Small and midsized businesses, and my deepest focus is print technology dealers and MSPs, because that’s where my career has lived. I’ve supported nearly every major line in this industry from both the OEM and the dealer side. I know the programs, the portals, the MDF, and the math of how a dealer actually makes money. I can close my eyes and see how a dealership runs. That’s worth something on day one.
ENX: How has Haney Strategy fared thus far and how have you been able to reach prospects?
HANEY: I launched in April, and these first months have gone into getting the company on its feet. The website, the brand, the contracts, the tech stack, the accounting, all of it from scratch. I enjoy this stage, and it rewards the thing I’ve always counted on: I’ve yet to meet anyone who can outwork me. I was also blessed to get out of the gate with early engagements and that work is growing.
As for how people find me, it’s been relationships and referrals, which, after 27 years, is exactly what I hoped for. People know the quality and the integrity of the work. The other door is my writing. I publish a series on my site called Signal Notes, and the traffic has been genuinely encouraging. There’s no funnel behind it, no forms, no gates. It’s simply how people get to see how I think, note after note. Sometimes that earns a conversation. Sometimes it’s just useful to somebody. Both are fine with me.
ENX: Tell us more about Signal Notes and how you approach the content.
HANEY: A Signal Note is a page out of my journal. It’s me sharing what I’m seeing, building, reading and working through, with whoever wants to read it. There’s deliberately no call to action at the end, and I know that runs against every marketing playbook ever written. I didn’t want anyone to feel a pitch coming. In one Note about AI loops, I gave away a working tool I had built. No form, no email address, no gate. Another one decoded, in plain English, more than 70 of the AI terms this industry keeps hearing from every stage and every vendor deck. I want to be a contributor in this space, someone who puts something useful back into the community with every Note.
I hold the Notes to two rules. They have to teach something real, or I don’t write them. And they have to work for the technical reader and the non-technical one, so no jargon. Writing that way also happens to perform well in search, and increasingly in AI search. I build that visibility for clients, so I watch it closely, but with the Notes it’s the byproduct, not the point.
ENX: What are some of the major challenges facing your target client base, particularly the dealer community?
HANEY: Start with the honest math. Print isn’t going away. It’s changing: people still need it and want it, just not at the volume of ten years ago. As A3 gives way to A4, the click and service revenue comes down with it. That pressure is real, and it isn’t the dealer’s fault. The response is diversification, and there’s no shortage of doors: IT services, managed security, document workflow and physical security. But every one of those doors brings its own economics, its own talent question, and its own timeline. Each one is an article of its own.
What I’ll say here is that there’s no silver bullet for any of it and that includes AI. I say that as someone who uses AI more than almost anyone I know: I’m working as much as I ever have and you get out of it exactly what you put in.
So my honest answer on the biggest challenge is focus. Don’t try to be everything to everyone. Start inside the business you already have, the MIF you’ve already earned, figure out which accounts fit the next service, and have the patience to ride it out. Pick a lane and be great in it. That’s what sets a dealer apart, and it’s the advice I run my own company on. My lane is connecting marketing, technology and AI into one engine, and this channel is home.
ENX: What will be your keys to growth moving forward?
HANEY: The keys for me aren’t flashy. Do really good work, and take on the right work. Everything else follows from that.
Stay a student of the craft. This market is moving fast, and the offering will keep molding itself around what customers and the market need. What Haney Strategy looks like a year from now should be shaped by the people it serves.
And as the work expands, I’ll add talent to the company. More hands, but always my two eyes. That’s why it’s my family’s name on the letterhead, and the people who know me know exactly what that means. When I help a company, I’m helping a brand, and behind that brand are employees, and behind them are families. I’ve never taken that lightly.
ENX: What are your company’s goals for the next 12 months, and what will success look like in your eyes?
HANEY: Twelve months from now, the measure that matters most is that the companies I work with are growing because of the work. A fuller pipeline. Marketing that finally shows up in the P&L. An AI workflow or two that hands a team back real hours every week.
I’m deliberately not tying my own success to a revenue number, because if the work is exceptional, the revenue follows, and chasing it for its own sake is how the work stops being exceptional. What I want to build is momentum: a growing book of work I’m proud of, and every client ending an engagement ready to renew, ready to refer, and ready to build the next thing together. If that’s true, and I’ve earned a real foothold in this industry as someone worth bringing in, that’s the year I’m after.
