Tess Robinson — HER Connections

How I got here

Five chapters, one habit.

Every job I have had comes down to the same reflex: look at a system, find the part that is failing, fix it before it takes everything else down with it. The setting keeps changing. The work does not.

Chapter 01

The ICU

I started my career at the bedside as an intensive care provider. It is a job with no room for a vague answer. You walk into a room, read a person who cannot always tell you what is wrong, and decide what matters in the next ten minutes rather than the next ten days.

What that teaches you is triage. Not everything broken needs fixing right now, and the loudest alarm is often not the one that will kill you. You learn to find the single thing that, left alone, takes down everything downstream of it.

The patients became companies. The reflex stayed exactly the same.

It also taught me the other half of the job, which is that precision without empathy does not land. You can be entirely right about what needs to happen and still fail, because the person in front of you is frightened and nobody explained it in a way they could hear. That has been true of every founder conversation I have had since.

Chapter 02

The switch

Technology pulled me out of healthcare. I moved into digital marketing and emerging tech, and found the same puzzle in different clothing: a system with signals coming off it, most of them noise, a few of them the actual story.

I spent those years learning how attention works. How to read data without flattering yourself with it, how to build a campaign that converts rather than one that wins compliments, and how to tell the difference between a brand people recognize and a brand people trust.

It was also where I learned to be genuinely comfortable with things I did not understand yet, which turns out to be the entire job in a market that resets every eighteen months.

Chapter 03

Operations

Then came the decade that shaped how I actually work. Operations, integration, business strategy. Leading companies through the messy middle of transformation, where the plan is sound and the execution keeps collapsing under its own weight.

I ran full rebrands, the kind where the visual identity is the easy part and the hard part is getting a company to agree on what it sells. I built the go-to-market plans and then the standard operating procedures underneath them, because a strategy that only one person knows how to run is not a strategy.

This is where the founder pattern became obvious to me. Companies rarely fail from a shortage of ideas. They fail because nothing was written down, the numbers lived in four places, and every decision routed through one exhausted person.

Chapter 04

The other side of the table

Evaluating companies for a living taught me what separates a business that is worth something from one that only works while the owner is standing in it. The difference is almost always operational.

I have watched promising companies lose value because the numbers were unclear, the process lived in one person's head, or every decision depended on the founder. I have also watched a business become more durable simply because its owner could finally see what was happening inside it.

The strongest businesses are not always the loudest. They are the ones that keep working when the owner steps away.

That judgment shapes how I advise. I look for the operational gap underneath the story, then help build the part that makes the business stronger, clearer, and less dependent on one person.

Chapter 05

HER Connections

HER Connections came out of all of it. The challenges, the pattern recognition, and a network I spent twenty years building on purpose. It is how I pay the ladder back down.

The idea is simple: give founders the resources, the operating help, and the introductions that are usually locked behind knowing the right person. Most founders are not missing talent. They are missing access, and access is a solvable problem.

HER is an acronym I gave myself as a daily reminder of why any of this exists. Help Everyone Rise. It is on the wall, it is in the name, and it is the filter I run decisions through when a choice is not obvious.

Currently

What I am doing now.

Investing

FTB Capital Group

I invest in early companies, which keeps me sharp on what makes a business durable rather than just busy.

Operating

HER Connections

Fractional operating support for founders, plus a community of people building without a full executive bench behind them.

Talking

Answering AI

A podcast I co-host with journalist Joe Vazquez, working through what AI is actually changing and what is just noise.

Writing

Future Technology Has Arrived

My newsletter on where technology, health, and capital are colliding. Written for operators rather than spectators.

How I work

Four things I believe.

01

Rest is not a reward. It is operational infrastructure.

Founders treat recovery as something they have earned once the work is done, which guarantees it never happens. Your capacity to make good decisions is a system like any other, and it degrades without maintenance. I plan for it the way I plan for cash.

02

Systems beat heroics.

A company held together by one person working weekends looks impressive right up until that person gets sick. Build the boring process now and you buy back the ability to grow later.

03

If it only lives in your head, it is not a process.

The test is simple. Could someone else run this on Monday without calling you? If not, what you have is a habit, and habits do not survive hiring.

04

Boring numbers, honestly kept, beat a good story.

An owner who knows their real margin will always outperform one with a better story and softer numbers. You can feel the difference in a business within about ten minutes of looking at it.

Off the clock

The rest of it.

Horses

A lifelong equestrian. Nothing has taught me more about patience or about reading something that cannot explain itself.

Teaching

I teach fitness classes at Equinox. It keeps me honest about the rest-as-infrastructure thing.

Minta

German Shepherd and Australian Cattle Dog mix, adopted through Pets In Need. Opinionated, and usually right.

Collecting

I collect art. It is the one part of my life where I do not ask what the return looks like.

Next step

Come tell me what you are building.

Whether you need an operator, an investor, or a straight answer about which one you actually need.

See how we work together Book a call