The Finance Executive Who Reads 15 Newsletters Before Breakfast

Most finance executives start their day checking spreadsheets and P&L reports. Taylor Thomson starts his by becoming a content curator.

Before 9 AM, Thomson scans approximately 15 industry newsletters—Modern Retail, Glossy, Morning Brew, and publications covering the marketing and retail landscape. The entire ritual takes 15-20 minutes. He’s not doing this for personal enrichment. He’s mining for signals that his business development team can use when talking to prospects.

“You can pull so much interesting information from how people are thinking, what they’re doing, what their challenges and pain points are,” explains Thomson, who leads revenue operations at WITHIN. When a retail company announces strong Q3 earnings, their competitors immediately start questioning whether their marketing strategies are adequate. These moments create openings for sales conversations—but only if your team understands the context. Taylor Thomson’s professional approach to intelligence gathering has become a defining feature of how he leads his team.

This practice reflects an unusual background for someone in finance leadership. Thomson studied political science, economics, and Spanish at Davidson College—not exactly the typical pre-business track. His first job out of college involved working at a financial services firm where he needed to rapidly develop working knowledge of wildly different industries.

“I can have a 10-minute conversation with you about how fire investigators in California investigate wildfires and make decisions about who is at fault,” Thomson notes. “I can’t have an 11-minute conversation, but I can go 10 minutes.” This ability to quickly absorb context proved more valuable than deep specialization in any single domain.

The morning briefing creates leverage for his entire team. Rather than each business development rep independently researching prospects, Thomson curates intelligence everyone can use. When a startup announces a funding round, he flags it. When supply chain disruptions hit a sector, the team knows before prospects bring it up.

“When a startup IPOs, that in and of itself is not only going to affect that startup, but also every one of their competitors,” Thomson explains. Smart teams connect these dots. Most organizations don’t bother. His work at the Denver-based agency demonstrates how revenue operations extends beyond traditional finance responsibilities.

The practice also models what Thomson advocates more broadly: creating value without demanding immediate returns. He can’t draw direct lines between specific newsletter articles and closed deals. But he knows the cumulative effect of being informed matters more than precisely attributable outcomes.

For executives wondering how to make their teams more effective, Thomson’s answer is counterintuitive: stop obsessing over activity metrics and start improving the intelligence your people are working from. Better context produces better conversations. Better conversations eventually produce better results.

This philosophy extends to how WITHIN approaches marketing. The agency created The Marketing Pulse—real-time data about social media costs and performance—completely free, no registration required. It’s the same principle: provide genuine value without demanding anything in return. Taylor Thomson’s perspective on marketing effectiveness challenges conventional wisdom about lead generation and ROI measurement.

The morning ritual isn’t glamorous. It doesn’t generate headlines about innovative leadership practices. But it represents how modern revenue operations actually works: connecting information across domains, creating context for better decisions, and building infrastructure that helps teams perform rather than just measuring their performance. Those interested in Thomson’s broader approach can explore his documented methods for building revenue operations infrastructure.