Diamond Hazelton LLC
Picture your e-commerce business five, ten, twenty times bigger. If you like what you see, we should talk.
About Carl Diamond » About Carl Diamond
About Carl Diamond
This is the story of more than forty years of business experiences, that by some standards, would be considered unconventional. It is a story of success and failure, trial and error and learning things the hard way. These experiences evolved over time into a set of strategic principles I want to share, that when appropriately applied, give you an edge in challenging business situations. It further produced a very large quiver, bursting with tactical arrows (see: strategy vs. tactics) that cover the entire gamut from traditional outbound telemarketing and direct mail to search engine optimization and web traffic conversion. It is also a story about a love affair with business and business strategy that has lasted a lifetime.
Ignition occurred in the basement of a church, in a little coal mining town in southeastern Kentucky, at age eleven. I arrived early (I still do) for a Cub Scout meeting and picked up a copy of the Harlan Daily Enterprise (still printing). I read that one man now owned all the ketchup in the world. That man was named Norton Simon and he had just bought Hunt’s Ketchup. (I’m still hooked). My father worked for a retail chain that sold clothing, furniture and jewelry to coal miners. He hired me to work every day after school and all day Saturday. At some point, I decided that I would be the owner one day.
Things got going when, after more than four years and three majors, I dropped out of U.C.L.A. to run a business. Proceeds were rolled into real estate and other businesses. In the recession of the early 1970s, I was wiped out. Lessons were learned, the hard way, about leverage and the arrogance of youth. A few years of false starts landed me at Merrill Lynch in San Jose, CA for five years and Smith Barney for twelve more, from which I retired to manage my own investments and co-found an ecommerce business.
Seventeen years in the investment business was graduate school, learning to value businesses as investments from the perspective of Wall Street. I was naturally attracted to business owners as clients, and they turned out to be a high percentage of my clientele. Conversations naturally moved to their business issues, and I always enjoyed the dialogue, whether it was about a single location carpet store or a manufacturer of sophisticated electronic components.
This bio would not be complete without two acknowledgements. The great good fortune of my life has been my marriage of thirty four years to my wife Marty. She has been my partner in every sense of the word, including, literally, as a team during all the years in the brokerage business. My gratitude for her willingness to tirelessly brainstorm every issue that arose cannot be expressed in words.
I would also like to acknowledge the contribution of Mary Curtis, CEO and Founder of Pacifico (advertising, public relations). Mary is a world class strategist in her own right and without her insights, this website, and this business would be less than they are.