Mickey Clinard

Mickey has spent his entire career working with small businesses. Not by design. It's just the world he grew up in. His parents ran a business together in Pensacola, and that shaped how he thinks about work: practically, and always with the owner's reality in view.

He spent 30 years in sales and marketing, more than 20 of those in residential mortgage, sitting across the table from small business owners as they made some of their biggest financial decisions. That's where he learned to read a room, ask the right question, and tell someone the truth even when it wasn't what they wanted to hear. It's the foundation of how he advises HKI's clients today.

He's also been the tech person in the room for as long as he can remember. His mom bought him his first computer at 14, and the interest never left. It ran alongside his sales and mortgage career, with stints in tech sales, startup work in Atlanta, and digital signage mixed in along the way. When AI started making real noise, he was ready to move. He'd been building toward it without knowing it.

At HKI, Mickey works as an AI advisor, not a technologist. He joins Jenni on discovery calls, helps shape one-on-one training frameworks and group workshop content, and brings his sales and marketing background to how clients get advised. He also runs the operational and technical side of the business internally: he built the company's website, designed the tech stack, and leads development of the custom AI tools that come out of deeper client relationships. His rule for that work hasn't changed: if it doesn't earn its place in the day-to-day, it doesn't ship.

He's Google AI professional certified and Anthropic-certified, holds a marketing degree, and is a graduate of the University of West Florida.