A Fine Disregard is the advisory practice of James Hendrickson — former public-company President & COO — working with founders, boards, and operating teams at the moments that matter most.
Engagements are built around the decision in front of you — not a fixed menu. These are the areas where the work tends to concentrate.
Turning technology into a business: positioning, roadmap, pricing, and the go-to-market motion that gets a product bought, not just built.
P&L ownership and the operating cadence that turns strategy into shipped results — plus the cost discipline and restructuring judgment a tight runway demands.
A confidential, candid sounding board for founders and senior leaders carrying real weight — the calls you can't fully talk through with your own team or board.
Building teams that scale and contract with the business, and the operating culture that holds steady through either direction.
Public-company governance, investor communication, and the capital strategy behind a raise, a growth push, or a transition.
Partner ecosystems, alliances, and indirect go-to-market — the routes to market that compound revenue beyond a direct sales team.
As President & Chief Operating Officer of a publicly listed AI company (CBOE: VERS), James held full P&L accountability — raising and deploying capital, commercializing an enterprise AI platform across robotics, smart-city, and financial-services markets, and executing a restructuring that sharpened focus and extended runway.
Earlier, he built the global partner program that helped take an AI-robotics company public on NASDAQ, and led a $175M product portfolio inside Honeywell's $30B enterprise — growing it on channel programs that generated the majority of the unit's revenue.
Named inventor on multiple enterprise patents. Published AI research independently benchmarked against leading research-lab architectures.
James is a senior executive who has run businesses through the parts that are genuinely hard: commercializing new technology, raising and stewarding capital, scaling teams up — and, when the moment called for it, scaling them down without losing the mission.
His career spans a $30B global enterprise at Honeywell, a NASDAQ-listed robotics company, and the President & COO seat at a public AI company. He now brings that judgment directly to founders and leadership teams who want a peer who has actually sat where they sit.
Based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Working with clients wherever the work is.
A first conversation is straightforward and confidential — a chance to size up the problem and whether this is the right kind of help.