Bjorn Hazelquist — Independent Competitive Intelligence Analyst

I started in performance marketing — paid search, paid social, the usual rotation of dashboards and weekly reviews. The work taught me that most marketing decisions are made with the wrong half of the data: your own. You can optimize a funnel for years and still get out-flanked by a competitor who quietly re-priced, re-targeted, or rebuilt their information architecture while no one was watching.

From there I moved into SEO — first in-house, then as the analyst other teams called when their rankings cratered and no one could explain why. SEO is where I learned to read a competitor like a document: their internal linking, their content velocity, their backlink profile, their schema. The signal is always there if you know where to look.

Business intelligence was the next layer. Two years inside a B2B analytics team taught me how to build dashboards that exec teams actually open — pipelines, warehousing, the discipline of one source of truth. I left with a strong opinion: most BI tools are aimed at the wrong subject. They watch the company instead of the market.

Competitor intelligence is where all of it converges. SEO forensics, marketing telemetry, BI rigor — pointed outward, at the three to five companies that actually decide your next two quarters. That's the practice I run now, end to end, by myself.