Learning by Doing

When I joined my most recent company as CFO, I realized fairly quickly that there was one area where my direct experience was thinner than I would have liked: online and retail sales. I understood the numbers well enough—margins, contribution, customer acquisition cost, lifetime value—but understanding something conceptually is not the same as having lived it.

I’ve always believed that the fastest way to truly understand something is to do it yourself. Reading, asking questions, and reviewing reports are all useful, but there is a different kind of learning that only comes from personal accountability. When it’s your time, your money, and your decisions, the lessons tend to stick.

So instead of just studying e-commerce from the sidelines, I opened a small Etsy shop: myrdin3d.etsy.com.

The intent was never to build a meaningful business or side income (although it did and continues to do fairly well). The goal was learning. I wanted to experience firsthand what it actually takes to market and sell products online, from the ground up, without a team or infrastructure to hide behind.

I leaned into one of my hobbies and selected products that I believed would do well based on personal experience and observation. That alone was an education. It forced me to think like a customer instead of an operator: what problem does this solve, why would someone buy it, and what alternatives already exist?

From there, the real learning began.

I had to write advertising copy. Not board-level messaging or investor narratives, but short, direct descriptions that had to earn attention in a crowded marketplace. Writing copy that converts is a very different discipline than writing a memo or a strategy deck. You learn quickly what is clear, what is confusing, and what simply doesn’t matter to the buyer.

I had to take product photos. That sounds trivial until you try to do it well. Lighting, angles, backgrounds, consistency—it all affects perception and conversion. Seeing how dramatically presentation influences demand was a useful reminder that value is not just created; it is communicated.

Pricing was another area where theory met reality. I set prices with explicit margin targets in mind, but I also had to respond to market expectations, competition, and perceived value. It’s one thing to talk about gross margin in the abstract. It’s another to watch a product sit unsold because you missed the price by a few dollars—or to realize you left money on the table because you underpriced it.

I also learned more than I expected about intellectual property and commercial rights. Selling physical products forces you to think carefully about what you can legally sell, what designs are protected, what licenses are required, and where the boundaries actually are. This is the kind of knowledge that is easy to gloss over until you are personally exposed to the risk.

Perhaps most importantly, the experience gave me a better appreciation for the operational friction that exists in online sales. Order flow, customer questions, fulfillment issues, returns—all small individually, but very real when you are responsible for every step. It reinforced how easy it is, from a leadership position, to underestimate the cumulative load placed on teams closer to the customer.

None of this turned me into a world-class e-commerce expert or even close to in skills to the experts we had that did it every day. That was never the goal. What it did was give me a much more grounded perspective. When discussions come up about pricing strategy, marketing spend, product positioning, or margin pressure, I’m no longer relying solely on secondhand knowledge. I have context. I’ve felt the tradeoffs.

This experience also reinforced something I believe strongly about leadership: intellectual curiosity matters, but it has to be paired with action. Curiosity alone is passive. Doing something—even something small—forces discipline, humility, and learning in a way that observation never will.

As CFOs, we don’t need to be experts in every function. But we do need to understand the cadence of the business and the realities our teams face. Sometimes the best way to do that is to step outside your role and try something uncomfortable, imperfect, and very real.

For me, that meant opening a small Etsy shop and learning by doing.