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Turn Data into Growth

I help you find your ideal customers and remove the barriers preventing you from reaching them.

Diagnostic-first consulting. Data science and AI execution. 20+ years of experience

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Customer Intelligence

Finding, reaching and nurturing your ideal customers requires the right data strategy, technical infrastructure, and measurement framework. I diagnose growth barriers and build solutions—from prospect identification to channel analytics to predictive modeling.

Specialty: Financial services (banking, credit unions, fintech)

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AI & Analytics Capabilities

Before investing in AI, know what you're trying to solve and whether you're ready. I assess your data maturity, design practical AI roadmaps, and build prototypes to prove concepts before full implementation. Technical execution includes NLP, machine learning models, and AI agent development.

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The market is flooded with vendors. Which actually fit your needs? I help you evaluate build-vs-buy-vs-partner decisions with a clear framework: strategic fit, technical capability, risk alignment. Cut through the noise to find solutions that work for your business.

Long-Range AI · Perspective

The Forgotten Middle

America's mid-size companies carry a third of the private economy — and almost never make the news. This is the case for the 200,000 businesses in between.

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The premise

Small business gets the romance. Big business gets the headlines.

In between sit roughly 200,000 companies with $10 million to $1 billion in revenue — no ticker symbol, no lobby, no mythology. They are the middle market: the least celebrated segment of the American economy, and one of its strongest. This is their story, in verified numbers.

The middle market · Who they are
200,000

mid-size companies — just 3% of all U.S. firms.

$10M–$1B
the annual-revenue band that defines the middle market
Every sector
manufacturers, distributors, contractors, healthcare groups, software firms
Mostly private
many family-owned — and almost none of them famous

Source: National Center for the Middle Market (Ohio State University), Year-End 2025 Middle Market Indicator.

What they do · Share of mid-size firms by sector

No single industry owns the middle.

The biggest sector — wholesale trade — is barely one firm in six. Below it: retail, construction, manufacturing, professional services, healthcare. This is not a niche of the economy. It is a cross-section of it.

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Statistics of U.S. Businesses (2022), firms with annual receipts of $10M–$999.999M. Share of firms; a company operating in more than one sector is counted in each, so shares are of 321,448 sector records rather than of the firm total.

The weight they carry

3% of companies. One-third of the private economy.

1/3
of U.S. private-sector GDP
48M
jobs — roughly one in three private-sector workers
$14.8T
in combined annual revenue

Sources: National Center for the Middle Market, Year-End 2025 Middle Market Indicator (GDP share and employment). Revenue: U.S. Census Bureau, Statistics of U.S. Businesses 2022 — actual receipts of the 280,690 employer firms in the $10M–$1B band. NCMM's own materials still carry a "$10T+" revenue figure that appears not to have been updated in roughly a decade; the Census measurement is used here instead.

Scale · Nominal GDP and value added, 2025

Cut the middle market loose and it would be the world's third-largest economy.

Larger than Germany. Larger than Japan or the United Kingdom. Behind only China and the rest of the United States.

Countries: IMF World Economic Outlook, April 2026, nominal GDP for 2025. Middle market: one-third of U.S. private-sector value added, which the Bureau of Economic Analysis puts at $27.3 trillion for 2025 — the one-third share is NCMM's. Compared value added to value added, not revenue to GDP. An independent estimate built from Census SUSB receipts lands nearer $8 trillion; the third-place rank holds either way. The U.S. bar is shown net of the middle market so the segment is not counted twice.

Performance · Trailing 12 months, year-end 2025

Growing faster than the giants.

Source: NCMM Year-End 2025 Middle Market Indicator (survey of 1,000 executives, fielded Dec 2025); employment comparison via ADP. Self-reported figures.

Resilience · The Great Recession, 2007–2010

When the economy broke, the middle held.

Sources: NCMM Year-End 2025 MMI; Harvard Business Review, Farren & Makhija, March 2021.

The forgotten part

No ticker. No lobby. No mythology.

Small business has the SBA, a dedicated lobby, and its own national shopping holiday. Big business has index funds, analyst coverage, and the business press. The middle market has none of it — no federal agency, no index, and until a research center was founded in 2011, nobody even systematically counting it. That is how a third of the economy became invisible.

Context: the National Center for the Middle Market (Ohio State University) was established in 2011 as the first research institution dedicated to the segment.

The divide · Average revenue growth, past 12 months

Mid-size companies using AI are growing more than twice as fast.

Source: National Center for the Middle Market, "AI Adoption in the Middle Market Isn't About Experimentation, It's About Performance" (April 2026), drawing on the Year-End 2025 Middle Market Indicator. Companies with $10M–$1B in annual revenue.

The catch

Using it is not the same as getting something out of it.

Nine in ten mid-size companies now use AI, up from eight in ten just six months earlier. Among those users, one in three still has nothing to show for it.

The constraint is no longer access to the technology. Every firm in that bar already has it. The constraint is knowing where to point it.

Source: National Center for the Middle Market, Mid-Year 2026 Middle Market Indicator and the companion Perspective, "Recalibrating for Growth" (July 2026, n=1,005). Companies with $10M–$1B in annual revenue; return figures are reported among AI users.

The point

You are not a smaller version of a big company.

If you lead a mid-size business, you sit in the strongest and least celebrated seat in the American economy: a third of its output, one in three of its private-sector jobs, growth the S&P hasn't matched in years. And the firms in your segment that are getting AI right are already growing at twice the rate of the ones that aren't.

The difference between those two groups is not budget, and it is not access. It is judgment about where to apply it. Long-Range AI is here to advise mid-market leaders, diagnostic first, helping them see what will work and what will not.

Curious to learn more? Let's talk

Sources & notes

Every number, cited.

National Center for the Middle Market (Ohio State Univ., est. 2011) — Year-End 2025 Middle Market Indicator (survey of 1,000 C-suite executives, fielded Dec 2025): middle market defined as $10M–$1B annual revenue; ~200,000 firms (~3% of U.S. companies); one-third of private-sector GDP; ~48M jobs; 11.7% revenue growth vs S&P 500 at 0.5%; 7.8% employment growth vs ADP large-corporation 2.2%; +2.2M jobs added 2007–2010. middlemarketcenter.org

IMF World Economic Outlook, April 2026 — nominal GDP for 2025, cross-checked against World Bank national accounts (within 0.7% on every economy shown). Note that India stands 6th in this edition, behind Japan and the United Kingdom; earlier vintages had it 4th, and the reversal is a currency effect rather than a change in real output.

Bureau of Economic Analysis — GDP by Industry, 2025 annual (released June 2026): U.S. GDP $30.8T, of which private industries contributed $27.3T in value added and government $3.4T.

On the "fifth-largest economy" claim — NCMM and, following them, Harvard Business Review have described the middle market as the world's fifth-largest economy, derived from a "$10 trillion in annual revenue" figure. This deck does not use that framing. Company revenue is gross turnover and GDP is value added, so the two are not comparable; and on the arithmetic, only two economies have ever exceeded $10 trillion, which puts that figure third rather than fifth. The value-added comparison used here is the conservative version of the same point.

Harvard Business Review — Farren & Makhija, "The Middle Market Is Stressed, But Resilient," March 2021: large businesses shed 3.7M jobs 2007–2010; 2020 middle market revenue −1.2% vs large-corporation −5.5%.

U.S. Census Bureau — Statistics of U.S. Businesses, 2022 (released April 2025): sector composition of the 280,690 employer firms with annual receipts of $10M–$999.999M. Shares shown are of firms, computed across 321,448 firm-sector records (a firm operating in several sectors is counted in each). SUSB undercollects receipts for Management of Companies and Finance & Insurance, which is why the chart shows firm counts rather than revenue.

NCMM — Mid-Year 2026 Middle Market Indicator and the companion Perspective, "Recalibrating for Growth," July 2026 (n=1,005): 91% of middle market firms use AI in some capacity, up from 83% six months earlier; 66% report positive returns on AI investment; 67% expect to increase AI spending.

NCMM — Year-End 2025 MMI data deck, presented February 2026 (n=1,005): 25% cite a lack of AI skills and expertise within the company; 18% cite the lack of a clear strategy for where to apply AI; "adopting and integrating new technology" rose from 28% to 35% as a critical or significant business challenge, the largest single increase in the challenge set.

NCMM — "AI Adoption in the Middle Market Isn't About Experimentation, It's About Performance," April 2026, drawing on the Year-End 2025 MMI (AI users n=854, non-users n=151): average year-over-year revenue growth of 12.9% among AI users versus 5.8% among non-users. The same analysis reports AI users ahead of non-users on revenue growth incidence (87% vs 66%), headcount growth (60% vs 39%) and new product launches (55% vs 41%).

A note on the 66% figure — NCMM reports it within a passage about AI users, and it is presented here on that basis: 66% of the middle market companies that use AI report positive returns. It is not a share of all middle market companies. The deck states the denominator on the slide for that reason.

Definition note — Every figure in this deck describes companies with $10M–$1B in annual revenue. Statistics covering "small and mid-size business," firms under 500 employees, or MSMEs have been excluded even where they were flattering, because they blend in 30 million businesses that are not middle market. The one place the boundary is deliberately crossed is the company-examples slide, which is about firms growing into the band.

Compiled July 2026 by Long-Range AI · lrangeai.com

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