Ryan Jordan

I am the founder, owner, and publisher of Backpacking Light, an outdoor media, education, membership, and commerce company I have led for more than two decades. That operating history shapes how I consult: I understand the pressure of making decisions with imperfect data, limited time, constrained capital, and real customers waiting on the other side.

Backpacking Light has given me a long-running laboratory for product strategy, paid content, technical publishing, customer research, gear evaluation, ecommerce operations, education, live programming, and community development. It also taught me where growing companies tend to leak margin, attention, and momentum when their systems do not keep up with the business.

Before building Backpacking Light full time, I worked as an engineering researcher and earned a Ph.D. at Montana State University. My research background trained me to separate signal from noise, model complex systems, test assumptions, and translate technical evidence into decisions that nontechnical leaders can use.

I work best with serious operators who need better evidence before making expensive decisions: increasing growth spend, preparing for fundraising or acquisition conversations, repairing unreliable dashboards, diagnosing conversion problems, cleaning up fragile integrations, or building a decision layer that connects finance, marketing, commerce, product, and operations.

The work is principal-led and implementation-aware. I do not stop at strategy documents when the constraint is inside the data, code, workflow, or reporting layer. The goal is to shorten the distance between diagnosis, decision, build, and measurable operating improvement.