Better decisions begin with
better understanding.

Made With Empathy is led by April Bell and supported by Project Manager Lisa Martens.

Together, we combine strategic leadership with exceptional execution. April leads every engagement personally, while Lisa ensures every project runs with care — from recruiting and logistics to timelines, communication, and the countless details that create a seamless client experience.

When projects call for additional expertise, we expand thoughtfully with a trusted network of qualitative researchers, recruiters, analysts, facilitators, designers, and KAI practitioners we’ve partnered with over many years.

That means our clients receive senior-level thinking, supported by the right expertise, without unnecessary layers between great ideas and great work.

Looking back, my career doesn’t feel like a series of jobs. It feels like one long lesson in learning how people grow, why they struggle, and what helps them move forward.

Every season added another piece. Together, those experiences became Made With Empathy.

The first classroom wasn’t a school. It was a cotton farm in West Texas. Growing up there taught me to read the conditions, notice patterns, and understand that growth can’t be forced — it has to be cultivated.

That same lesson continued throughout my early career. Teaching middle school math in Peru taught me that learning begins with understanding, not information. Working as a commodity grain trader showed me how people make decisions under uncertainty. John Deere gave me a front-row seat to the intersection of customers, products, and business strategy. And supporting youth leadership development reinforced what I’d been learning all along: people grow when they feel seen, challenged, and understood.

At the time, these experiences seemed unrelated. Looking back, they were all teaching me the same thing: how to notice what matters before deciding what comes next.

More than twenty years ago, I stepped into my first focus group and found the work I was meant to do.

Thousands of conversations with customers, executives, employees, and stakeholders taught me something data alone rarely reveals: people don’t make decisions based only on information. They make them through beliefs, emotions, relationships, and meaning.

Eventually I realized the hardest work wasn’t uncovering customer insight. It was helping smart people with different perspectives trust each other enough to move forward together. That’s where facilitation, innovation, leadership, and Strategic Empathy came together.

Life eventually required me to use the same tools on myself. Going through divorce and rebuilding my own life changed how I thought about empathy.

Research had taught me how to understand other people. Life taught me that understanding others begins with understanding ourselves.

That experience became the foundation for The Fire Starter — and eventually expanded Made With Empathy beyond customer understanding into helping leaders build teams, navigate change, and create work that reflects who they truly are.