Results only count when they impact the P&L
Most consultants are happy to package awareness, tokens, or more data as “value.” They bill for hours spent building dashboards or refreshing creative. Very few of them will tell you what is going on outside your business and how that impacts demand, customer attrition, or informs your product mix.
If they do, it usually ends up in a deck presentation and a handoff to a different team. The gap between identifying why revenue dropped and what to do about it often gets lost in the handoff from consultant to agency. And while everyone reports a win in their department, margin continues to get squeezed.
At Fourth Order Intel, we are operators. We find trapped capital and do the work required to recover it.
Yes, we build ML/AI pipelines and launch campaigns. But that is not where we start. We start by finding where existing systems can be more efficient, to shorten your payback period and invest in only what will show up on your P&L.
Information without measurable impact is not an insight. Our methods surface what to build, and just as important, when to build nothing.
Every recommendation we make is tested against the control, followed quickly by implementation, with your approval.
Recent partners have cut advertising budgets by 27% while nearly doubling revenue, and dropped a multi-million-dollar systems vendor duplicating work another contractor was already doing. Across our careers that record runs past $4.7B in top-line growth.
Achieving this means setting our assumptions aside and allowing the data to surprise us, through forensic analysis, a love for accountability, and the grit to see execution through. It also means leaving your team more capable than we found it.
If you are tired of seeing an endless backlog or long decks when you need a straight answer, we built this firm for you.
We do the work required to win.
Omar J. Trejo
Founder & Revenue Architect
The Scoreboard
Sample Results
See more results
AI-ready platform
Digital Realty rebuilt its buyer journey measurement and the data platform underneath it, so the steps Global 2000 buyers actually take could be measured directly.
+30% YoY
A prior $1.5M strategy engagement had worked on a different problem. We rebuilt how creative, budget, and measurement worked together. Revenue grew 30% in the first year and 19% in the second.
$12M+ identified waste
Channel reports were siloed and the qualitative data sat locked in their data lake. We unified them, identified $12M+ in waste, and surfaced customer attrition risks 18 months in advance.
The operators
One cross-functional team. No handoffs.
We build what we recommend, and only recommend what you need.
Omar J. Trejo
Founder & Revenue Architect
In 2013, Omar shot a laser at creatine to map its contents onto a scatter plot. Three years later he took the same approach to identifying why people buy and why they leave.
He has spent the past 15 years living a double life as a systems engineer and a growth operator. On one side, forecasting software and machine learning pipelines for Fortune 15 companies. On the other, marketing for funded startups and publicly traded mid-market businesses. To him they are the same discipline: build what is needed to move more units.
That work has driven over $500M in new profit across DTC, B2B, and national retail.
For Potbelly, cutting non-performing channels and repositioning from a focus on the product to desired outcomes meant a 30% year-over-year lift from 2020 to 2021, followed by 19% the following year.
For a dwindling supplement brand, his team skipped the price war by feeding real-time insights directly back to the product and formulation teams. They shrank containers to fix bitter aftertaste, and diversified into a product mix with high LTV. An 87% revenue lift and tripled EBITDA followed over just 10 months.
And for MrCool, who struggled to move past three million annually, these systems helped them grow to $100M in three years.
Along the way, Omar watched competing incentives and broken compensation structures destroy client value at past agencies. The one thing he could not fix from the inside was the consulting model itself, so he built Fourth Order Intel.
Percentage of spend models encourage "driving awareness" without considering payback periods or margin. Continuous deployment turns into endless deployment, bloating OPEX.
Real alignment means recommending only what is required, exactly when it makes sense in the P&L.
VPs, directors, and C-suite executives bring him in to anticipate structural failures before they show up in the QBR or earnings report.
Harrison Carroll
Principal, Marketing and Paid Strategy
Harrison scaled a single client's advertising budget to $3 million a month on his own, under intense scrutiny. As the single point of contact for a mid-market insurance firm, he built the strategy and pushed the buttons himself across all channels.
He did this while leading the SMB team at KlientBoost, personally training the team and ensuring dozens of other accounts hit their performance targets.
Harrison's ability to look beyond the dashboard separates him from traditional marketers. He understands what the market is doing outside the business and brings those insights directly into day-to-day operations. His acquisition playbooks have helped companies drive billions in tracked sales.
When metrics shift, Harrison remains optimistic, calm, and confident. Those are the exact characteristics required from the person making decisions and allocating capital under intense pressure.
Shawn Zumbrunnen
Executive Creative Director
There is a stereotype about creatives who direct Super Bowl commercials. You expect ego. You expect the same from someone who led the writing team at Harmon Brothers, training directly under the founders who drove massive wins for Purple Mattress and Lume.
Shawn does not fit that stereotype. He has served as the personal writer for the founder of Lume and Mando. He has developed strategy for multi-billion dollar publishers. Yet he sets ego aside in the room. He is one of the most flexible and easy-to-work-with creatives in the industry.
Most creatives defend their art. Before Shawn makes a single edit to a script, he is the first person to ask what the data is telling us.
His fresh, upbeat nature strips the friction out of production. He makes demanding productions feel more like play than work for the people on them.
Mace Sorensen
Principal, Creative Operations
In the world of high-end production, "on time and on budget" are table stakes. As a pioneer of AI animation for Angel Studios, Harmon Brothers, and multi-million dollar brand strategies, Mace never needs to be asked to innovate.
With a massive footprint of credits spanning writing, directing, acting, and producing, Mace is the production counterpart to Shawn's writing.
He ensures the result on screen delivers everything you expect from a Hollywood commercial, and he engineers the process behind it. He manages everything from the first draft to final deployment to exacting specifications.
He owns the execution entirely. When something goes wrong on set or after, Mace absorbs it, reworking the shot, the schedule, or the budget before it reaches the client.
Beyond the core four, we bring in vetted specialists from our network: finance, data, and IT operators, including fellows and associates from firms like Deloitte, KPMG, and Incubeta, scoped to each engagement.
Why we’re called Fourth Order.
When revenue drops or a fire drill starts, most tools, dashboards, and teams evaluate the symptom in front of them. They rarely trace it to the cause.
We once found that a client’s best sales day had nothing to do with a new ad, an algorithm update, or a change to their site. A major news event had created urgent demand for what they sold. Once we knew to look for it, the same pattern repeated in smaller forms, a revenue spike almost every day. Reading what the market was reacting to in real time, instead of the features everyone else was comparing, is a repeatable pattern we have refined over the last ten years. To understand how much each factor matters, we use machine learning, which for this client meant seven hundred tests. That work took their customer acquisition cost from $52 to $13.50 in a matter of weeks.
A first-order answer stops at the symptom. A real answer traces the second, third, and fourth-order effects of a decision, and the second, third, and fourth-order causes behind a result. That is what the name means: we look forward to where a decision leads under different scenarios, and backward to the root cause, so a problem is prevented instead of repeated, and every engagement sharpens the next forecast.
How we operate
Prescription without diagnosis is malpractice.
The first problem you encounter is often a symptom with a cause three to four layers deeper. If we had stopped at optimizing a channel mix or reporting on ROAS, Potbelly might have missed out on 20% of their growth. If we had accepted the recommendations of the vendors selling cloud services at Digital Realty, they’d have wasted millions while falling years behind on legacy “best practices.”
We don’t waste your time on theoretical maturity models. You can embed us with your team, or take fixed-scope, fixed-bid implementations over a six-to-twelve-week sprint, so you know exactly what it costs before the work starts.
Any single number, followed on its own, can steer a business the wrong direction for years. In our world, nothing happens unless it results in profitable growth, a reduction in expenses, or directly enabling your team to execute.
Due diligence
Frequently asked questions
- Who is Fourth Order Intel?
- Based in Salt Lake City, UT, Fourth Order Intel is a consulting team built to close the gaps between marketing, IT, finance, and creative. We were founded in 2024 by veterans of data infrastructure, management consulting, paid media, and creative. Putting those four disciplines on one team is what makes the line between data and execution invisible: the people reading the numbers and the people acting on them are the same team.
- Who founded Fourth Order Intel?
- After spending 15 years as both a systems engineer and a growth operator, building forecasting and machine learning systems for Fortune 500 companies and running marketing for businesses from new startups to publicly traded firms, Omar J. Trejo started Fourth Order Intel. To him, data insights and marketing are one discipline, and it's why he's driven a combined $500M in new profit for clients. His team includes fellows from Deloitte, KPMG, and Incubeta, and he has built the team from creative and paid-media agencies, including Harmon Brothers and KlientBoost.
- How long has Fourth Order Intel been in business?
- Fourth Order Intel was founded in 2024, built on methodologies developed over 15 years of deploying marketing, machine learning, and cloud platforms. Over that time, the work has driven $4.7B in client revenue across our careers and opened $500M in new profit.
- What does Fourth Order Intel do?
- We find where a business is losing money in the gaps between marketing, tech, finance, and operations, then build systems and run the execution to close them. This work helps teams to maintain product-market fit, preventing perverse incentives and waste from choking profitability. We work across all business areas to drive cross-functional partnerships for companies from new startups to the Fortune 15. Recent work includes Digital Realty, Equinix, and Potbelly.
- What does an engagement with Fourth Order Intel look like?
- We prefer to scope and bid every engagement from the outset to ensure your team can anticipate the ROI before we begin. We are also flexible in working alongside or independently of your team, allowing you to embed us, or keep us available on retainer. Most implementations last 4-6 weeks. Each sprint is aimed at the quickest path to enablement or ROI rather than a multi-year initiative that only pays off at the end.
- Why is it called the Fourth Order Method?
- When revenue drops, most tools, dashboards, and teams evaluate the symptom in front of them rather than the cause. Stopping at the first-order answer leads to treating symptoms instead of the root cause. Our approach looks at the chain of events and their ripples to solve problems at their root. After one of our clients showed signs of losing product-market fit, seeing CAC spiking 6x in a period of months, we traced back their best-performing days to news events. This led to an entirely new perspective on how and why their customers purchased and resulted in a reduction of CAC by 47% in two cohorts. We aren't shy about helping your team to shed the superstitions of industry "best practices" and arming them with the insights they need to open and maintain a hold on new markets.
- How is Fourth Order Intel different from an agency or a consultant?
- Consultants make recommendations on work they aren't responsible for implementing. Agencies understand only the platforms they work in day-to-day. We take end-to-end accountability for understanding the market as a system and building everything from solutions that empower your team to the campaigns that attract and retain customers. Our primary focus is increasing your profits, not just revenue. And the end goal is that we skill up your team so they can manage systems and campaigns without us, so we can help you continue to innovate.
Start here, it’s free.
Find where you’re overspending in your business. Find out how much.
Answer twelve questions. Our team reviews your site, your ads, and your tech stack and returns a dollar-denominated estimate of recoverable waste across your business.
We evaluate these four common failure points:
- Advertising & Media Efficiency
- Go-to-Market Strategy
- Technology & Measurement
- People & Team Alignment
Confidential · Reviewed by our team