Microbusiness & Extreme Happiness Part 2: Kevin Lehmann
Part 2 in Microbusiness & Extreme Happiness
“I almost feel guilty about how much I enjoy my life.”
In the second installment of my Micro-Business & Extreme Happiness series I caught up with Kevin Lehmann, founder of Goods Intelligence, a fractional analytics and strategy practice for consumer-goods brands, while he strolled the evening streets of Amsterdam.
Kevin left a high-paying Wall Street research post in early 2021, moved his family to the Netherlands, and rebuilt his career around an idea he calls “daily discretion.” Here’s how he did it, what his solo setup looks like, and why he thinks many of us might be sprinting toward “pigeon-counter” jobs we never asked for.
From Wall Street analyst to fractional data brain
Kevin spent nearly a decade covering Kraft, Hershey, and Starbucks for Evercore and RBC. “I was writing about Oreos and cheeseburgers and pizza literally for a living making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year,” he told me. Then paternity leave hit in February 2021 and he quit. No pipeline. No soft landing. Just a feeling that he’d regret not testing what he refers to as his “independent commercial value” outside a big logo. “There was literally no income,” he recalls of that first summer.
Fast-forward: Goods Intelligence now sells slices of Kevin’s skill set (dashboards, pricing models, M&A prep) to a curated handful of growth-stage CPG brands.
What Goods Intelligence actually does
Kevin drops in for 5–30 hours a month per client, handling:
Retail-scanner and e-commerce data cleanup
Price-pack architecture and promo ROI models
Sell-side decks when founders explore an exit
He also runs Goods Partners, a micro M&A arm that helps owners of sub-$5 million food businesses line up buyers without hiring a traditional bank.
Designed small on purpose
Why no employees for now?
“The problem I’m solving is that clients need serious work done by someone they can trust, but they don’t need that person to work 9-5 every workday. So, this ethos carries through to my own business. I have a small network of contractors with specialties I can bring in and we solve those client problems together.”
Revenue can vary greatly when you run your own shop but Kevin lives in the low six figures. Roughly what an in-house analytics director might earn, minus the Manhattan commute and office politics.
In Amsterdam, those dollars also stretch a lot farther than they would in New York.
The nuts & bolts of his solo setup
Timezone arbitrage. U.S. west-coast clients mean a nine-hour gap. Mornings are for school drop-off, deep work runs 10 a.m.–3 p.m., client calls fire after 8 p.m.
Workspace mix. Home office half the time, pay-per-day coworking for marathon Excel builds, and Dutch cafés for thinking sprints.
Hours. 10–30 focused hours many weeks; heavy crunch windows hit 40; some weeks drop to ~10 when he “buys back” time with front-loaded effort.
Planning cadence. Friday evenings he blocks the next week in Notion: deliverables, biz-dev blocks, and at least one blank afternoon for strategy.
“If I want to work really, really hard on the first week of, say, June… so that I can go and take the next three weeks kind of off—that’s what I’m building.”
The soft stuff: family, canals & decompression
Kevin has seen his kids every morning since 2020. Afternoon walks with his wife beat rush-hour trains. Evenings often end with a quiet canal stroll before the 9 p.m. client block starts. “I kind of pinch myself sometimes,” he admits.
Philosophy corner: Puritan ghosts & pigeon counters
Puritan hangover. Kevin traces America’s hyper-busy culture to early New England settlers. “Idleness was sin,” he says, and the coding stuck.
Economic layers. Primary (logging) → secondary (manufacturing) → tertiary (services) → quaternary (consulting) → quinary (pure entertainment). Automation keeps mowing down rungs.
Pigeon-counter future. His thought experiment: when AI handles everything, governments may invent busywork—literally counting pigeons—to keep humans occupied.
The remedy, he argues, is owning work that can’t be scripted away.
Advice for would-be solopreneurs
Inventory micro-skills. Break your job into atomic tasks—budget modeling, copywriting, carbon accounting.
Hunt boring businesses. There are thousands of $5-50 MM companies that need those tasks done and don’t advertise on LinkedIn.
Offer a sliver first. One free pilot produces a case study, and a case study lands a retainer.
Portfolio your income. One paycheck becomes several fractional gigs; no single client can crater your year.
Expect feast/famine. An entire summer at zero revenue is normal; runway matters.
What’s next for Kevin
He’s lining up two additional retainers, automating his spreadsheet grind with Python, and scouting small U.K. food brands for a buy-side client. Nothing flashy, just consistent steps that maintain his agency and ownership of his own life and calendar.
Kevin Lehmann is proof that success isn’t headcount, an exit multiple, or even revenue past a certain threshold. It’s the freedom to answer email when you choose, work with companies you believe in, and still catch daylight at 9 p.m. on an Amsterdam canal. As more professionals trade titles for autonomy, stories like his light the way.
Here’s where to follow Kevin for more of his particular flavor of outside-the-box business philosophy:
Substack –
, (philosophy), and (CPG data dives)Consulting Site – https://www.goodsintelligence.com/
Drop in next week for Part 3 where I talk to a Detroit native who broke out of the grind to start an independent executive recruiting business with her husband. They now reside full-time in Costa Rica and also run a small regenerative farm and local market.