Jay Fontanini

I spent three decades solving hard problems in insurance. Most of that time in nonstandard auto, serving customers who face high stakes and tough decisions every month.

The career path wasn't linear. Political Science from Austin College, a liberal arts school. Early years in product management at Leader and Hartford. Then I hit pause, earned an MDiv magna cum laude from Knox Theological Seminary while serving four years as a church's Minister of Resources and Finance. Turns out, helping people navigate life's toughest moments teaches you something about listening, about humility, and about the difference between what people say they need and what they actually need.

I came back to insurance because the problems were interesting and I was good at solving them. AIG, then Kemper, then Bankers, where I pivoted to new home builders commercial insurance products, marketing, and sales.

Most recently, I spent nearly a decade at The General, joining in 2015 as Director of Product Development and leaving in 2023 as Vice President of Revenue Optimization and Analytics. In between, I helped grow the company from a regional carrier to a national brand.

I built a marketing performance measurement framework from scratch. Grew investment in lead generation through balanced optimization and continuous testing. Scaled a monetization program that resold out-of-appetite consumer responses to recoup roughly one-third of our ad spend.

The throughline is this: I work backwards from strategic outcomes. Big goals, pursued through a series of calculated decisions supported with analytics.

Colleagues have called me a lot of things over the years:

I launched Fontanini Advisory Services in late 2023. The work is fractional executive guidance for companies that need to make better decisions about strategy, marketing performance, and customer acquisition. Not strategy decks that sit in folders. Not PowerPoint theater. Though I've been known to purchase a domain and build a private interactive website just to share my vision for your solution.

I'm based in North Carolina. I roast my own coffee at home and bring it to meetings.