# The Three of Us: Jon, Jen, and Bob
Most consulting firm websites tell you what they sell. This one is going to tell you who's selling it, because the people are the methods. After this post, the blog goes back to ideas and work — agentic engineering, context design, build-vs-buy, the scholarship mechanics, all of it. But the rest of those posts make more sense if you know who's behind them and how three different practices ended up under one name.
Three of us, doing three things, on purpose.
## Bob
My dad started Nellson Associates in 1997 as a consulting firm focused on operations and management. He ran it for years, took the website down in 2021 when he scaled back, and would have let the URL lapse if I hadn't called him about it.
Bob is the reason any of this exists. He's the one who ran a real consulting practice for decades, kept clients for years on the strength of the work, wrote a book about how to do it, and treated me like a future colleague long before I had earned that. The 2026 edition of *So You Want to Be a Consultant?* — which is in active rewrite right now — is a co-author project. He brings the foundation. I bring the modernization, the platform, and the agentic-engineering frame that didn't exist when he wrote the first edition. His chapters explain how to actually run a practice. My chapters explain what's changed in the last five years and what hasn't.
What Bob brings to this is patience and judgment. He has watched more bad consulting decisions than I will see in my career, and he can usually name what's wrong with a plan in two questions. He shows up in this work whether or not he's quoted, and you'll see him directly in the book and in occasional posts where his voice is what the topic needs.
## Jen
Jen is my wife and the founder of Dynamic Discoveries, an early-childhood and elementary curriculum business that operates entirely separately from Nellson Associates. Different focus, different clients, different P&L. We share a kitchen table and a calendar, not a company.
She matters to this blog for two reasons. First, the practical one: she's running a parallel venture in real time, which means a lot of what I write about building, scaling, and operating a one-person practice has been pressure-tested at our kitchen table. When I write about platform decisions or business-model tradeoffs, it's not theory. We've done it. Twice, in parallel.
Second, the substantive one: Dynamic Discoveries is moving toward AI-assisted curriculum generation, and the design problem there is exactly the kind of agentic-engineering question my consulting work centers on. How do you personalize student worksheets without compromising instructional equivalence? How do you let an AI generate the surface layer while locking the educational skeleton? That problem is going to show up on this blog — sometimes as a Nellson Associates post, sometimes as a co-authored piece with Jen.
So when you see Dynamic Discoveries referenced in posts going forward, it's not a digression. It's the same set of ideas applied to a different domain. Education has accountability requirements that most enterprise AI implementations would benefit from, and Jen has thought about those constraints longer than most.
## Me
I'm Jon. I run the Nellson Associates consulting practice and I'm the founder of Jexida, an MCP and second-brain platform we use internally and that informs the consulting work.
The short version of what I do: I help organizations move beyond AI experiments into practical agentic engineering. That means designing the context, workflows, tools, and governance that AI agents need to perform real business work safely and consistently. The slightly longer version is on the consulting page; the much longer version is what the rest of this blog is going to be.
My background is operator-side. I've been a developer, a senior manager at a Fortune 50, a Sr. Manager, Healthcare Data Operations at CVS Health, and at every step I have been the person who builds the thing that translates between business teams and technical teams. The agentic-engineering work I do now is the natural next step. Software 1.0 was explicit code. Software 2.0 was learned weights. Software 3.0 is context, prompts, tools, and agents. The work changes. The translator role doesn't.
I'm also the person rebuilding the practice's platform from scratch — Django, HTMX, no SaaS. There's a post about that coming up. I'm the one rewriting the book with my dad. And I'm the one who decided that 50% of book and community revenue should go to a scholarship fund, which is its own post too.
## What we're doing collectively
There are three threads under the Nellson Associates roof:
**The consulting practice** is mine. AI readiness, agentic workflow design, context engineering, MCP architecture, human-in-the-loop systems. Six- to eighteen-month engagements that blend strategy and implementation. I'll write about the methods on this blog more than the engagements themselves, because the engagements belong to the clients.
**The book** is the joint Bob-and-me project. *So You Want to Be a Consultant?* — 2026 edition. Restructured chapters, an audiobook for the first time, and a blog series that builds on chapter themes. If you subscribe to the blog, you'll see those posts arrive in alignment with chapter releases.
**The scholarship fund** is the thread that connects the two. Half of every dollar from book sales and from the community subscription goes into a scholarship fund with a public dashboard and proper tax receipts. The point isn't charity-marketing. The point is that the practice was built to be a vehicle for something larger than billable hours, and the cleanest way to lock that intention into the business model was to wire it into the math from day one.
Dynamic Discoveries operates separately, but its ideas show up here because it's the same intellectual frame applied to elementary education.
## What this blog will be
Going forward, this blog is about ideas and methods. Agentic engineering. Software 3.0. Context engineering. Build-vs-buy decisions for operators. The mechanics of the scholarship fund. The architecture of Jexida. The lessons from rewriting the book.
It is not going to be a personal blog. The next post you see won't open with a story about my kids. The point of doing this introduction in one place is so the rest of the work can stand on its own without me repeatedly explaining who I am.
If you're a business leader trying to figure out how to do AI implementation without buying into the hype cycle — that's what most of these posts will help with. If you're a consultant trying to decide whether to build your own practice infrastructure — there's a post for that too. If you're an educator wondering whether AI personalization can be done without compromising instructional integrity — Jen and I will write about that one together.
If you want to talk about an engagement, [the consulting page is here](/consulting/). If you want to subscribe to the blog or the print-mail edition (yes, you can have these mailed to you), [the subscribe page works](/blog/). If you're an old client of Bob's and you found this site looking for him — welcome back, he's still part of this, and he'd love to hear from you.
## Why I'm doing this
There's a simpler version of running a consulting practice that doesn't involve a Django platform, a co-authored book, a scholarship fund, a community subscription, and a print-mail pipeline. I have considered it. I have rejected it.
The simpler version assumes the work I do is interchangeable with the work everyone else does, and that the job is to deliver hours efficiently. That's not the practice I'm running. The practice I'm running treats the consulting, the book, the scholarship, and the platform as one connected thing — because the same intellectual frame underwrites all of it, and because letting any of those threads become someone else's problem would weaken the others.
We're going to do the thing. All of it. Not because it's the efficient path, but because the connections are where the actual value lives.
That's who's here. The rest of the blog is the work.