At WS Audiology, the telephone was winning. Providers trying to do business with the hearing-care company found calling easier than using its digital tools. A portal existed. Customers had another idea. That quiet vote of no confidence is a useful introduction to Shift Paradigm, the consultancy hired to examine the experience. A company can purchase the right technology and still make the customer work too hard.
- Shift connects marketing strategy, customer data, software and execution.
- Its customers include financial services, healthcare, software and hospitality businesses.
- The practical lesson: inspect the customer’s obstacles before adding another tool.
01 / The customer has already voted
In an August 2025 conversation, WS Audiology marketing operations executive Toyin Powell described feedback from providers and customer service. Shift’s assessment combined interviews, technology audits and data analysis. It identified awkward navigation, product-filtering problems and conflicting information from connected systems. The priorities became simpler navigation, better ordering and clearer reporting. Customer feedback supplied the reason to act; the assessment supplied an order of operations.
“We wanted to make it easy.”Toyin Powell / WS Audiology
Notice the unit of analysis: someone trying to finish a task. The portal’s existence was beside the point. This is where Shift’s proposition becomes intelligible. It sells the work required to connect a business’s intentions with what its systems and employees actually do.
02 / An email company follows the problem
The roots go back to September 2010, when Morgan Stewart and Andrew Kordek founded Trendline Interactive. Email was the starting point. Even in a 2011 announcement, Stewart argued that email could not operate efficiently in isolation. The larger problem was already peeking through the inbox.
Acquisitions supplied additional skills. Inbox Pros brought deliverability and compliance expertise; Inbox Marketer added email capabilities. In 2021, Data Insight Group and LeadMD expanded analytics and marketing automation. That November, Trendline and LeadMD unified as Shift Paradigm. The name arrived eleven years after the original business.
Elizabeth “Liz” Ross became CEO in January 2022. The March 2024 acquisition of Principle Studios extended UX, UI and engineering capabilities, with Ryan and Adam Brill taking senior experience and technology roles. Each addition widened the range of problems Shift could handle without handing the client to another firm.
03 / Follow the lead. Then follow the money.
A published healthcare technology case makes the work unusually concrete. The client had inherited overlapping systems through acquisitions. Some software went unused. Quality leads could become stuck waiting to reach the right salesperson. Shift’s Tech Navigator assessment also found organic leads converting at eight times the rate of other channels, challenging assumptions about paid advertising.
Shift reports $2.5 million in IT savings and monthly average revenue rising from $2 million to $4 million. Those are company-reported outcomes. The case does not provide a controlled comparison. Its most transferable finding is the sequence: examine utilization, compare conversion and repair routing before treating additional spending as the answer.
IT savings from eliminating wasted spending on unused and inefficient technology.
First Command’s problem was different. Financial advisors serving military families needed a fuller picture of each client. Shift built a Client 360 program involving shared definitions, governance, behavioral segmentation and a tailored lifetime-value model. Finance, marketing, sales and compliance participated. The enterprise data team received explicit ownership. Better information needed an organizational address as well as a database.
04 / Strategy with its sleeves rolled up
Shift occupies the space where management consulting, marketing services and systems integration overlap. Its services range from technology assessments and revenue operations to campaign production, customer analytics and custom applications. Buyers can ask for a roadmap, a platform implementation or help running the resulting machinery.
Its work with Smoothie King included moving from Iterable to Braze and connecting the loyalty platform, with campaigns spanning email, SMS, push, in-app and web channels. For Equine Network, Shift describes bringing together Braze, Tealium and Power BI after eight businesses merged. Both examples appear in its 2025 Forge materials. The common task is coordinating systems around a customer relationship.
Adobe, Salesforce, Braze and Optimizely feature in its partner ecosystem. Large consultancies, specialist implementation agencies and internal teams are all plausible alternatives. Shift’s positioning is breadth across strategy and delivery. A buyer should test that promise against the actual team assigned to the engagement.
Maintaining that range takes training. Shift advertises paid technology certifications and development plans for its primarily remote workforce. In September 2025 it announced Beth Corby’s selection as an Adobe Marketo Engage Champion; in February 2026 it published Aarzoo Kothari’s Salesforce Marketing Cloud Champion recognition. Such credentials indicate platform knowledge. They still leave the buyer with the practical questions: who will do the work, how will decisions be documented, and can the client operate what gets built?
05 / The invoice is part of the design
This is a services business, with scope determining the bill. First Command’s case describes a fixed-fee engagement. Clutch lists $200-$300 an hour. A public November 2024 proposal gives a more revealing specimen: a $220 blended hourly rate and 16% project management. Discovery, interviews, competitive analysis and architecture all appear as priced work. These are proposed terms, not proof of expenditure or a universal tariff.
Growth has also required capital. Growth Catalyst Partners backed the business, Balance Point supplied debt and equity for the LeadMD transaction, and Bow River announced acquisition financing in March 2024. That history places Shift within the market for acquired and combined specialist services firms.
06 / A useful question before the next purchase
The reader can copy a modest discipline: choose one customer task, trace every handoff and ask who owns the failures. Measure completion, conversion or response time. Then choose the intervention. This is an inference from the cases, not a promise that every audit produces the same returns.
The approach depends on access to usable data, cooperation across teams and authority to change the process. Without those conditions, a roadmap can become another document awaiting approval. A small business with a simple customer journey may need a much smaller intervention. For complex enterprises, however, the revealing question remains wonderfully ordinary: why was picking up the phone easier?