I help service firm owners figure out what makes their firm different, then turn it into marketing that actually says it.

I've been a marketing executive for most of my career. A marketing agency I built and ran for 12 years. CMO roles at multiple companies. Clients like Disney, Microsoft, Walmart, Motorola, and Yahoo. Hundreds of businesses from raw startups to billion-dollar enterprises.

But I couldn't care less about increasing profits for a Fortune 500 megacorporation. The work that actually gets me out of bed is helping smaller businesses figure out why they keep losing deals to competitors that do worse work. That's the problem I keep coming back to, no matter what else I'm doing.

I grew up in a small business family. My dad was a roofer. Some of my earliest memories are sitting at the kitchen table licking stamps for his direct mail campaigns while he explained why the layout, the font choices, and the words on those mailers mattered. I'd read Covey, Carnegie, and Napoleon Hill by the time I was 14. My dad wanted me to read those. Business mattered to him, and he wanted me to be good at it.

I started college at 16. Picked up web design when a computer lab manager got tired of me playing video games, shoved an HTML guide across the desk, and told me to make myself useful. Taught myself to code, got contract work for the college and then Arizona State University, got elected student body president because I marketed myself better than the other candidates, and graduated with a full-ride university scholarship after being named one of the top 20 junior college students in the country — which was good, because I came from a poor family and that was about my only shot at a degree.

Then I left the agency world to experience design and marketing from an in-house perspective. I was hired as Head of Product Design at Infusionsoft (now Keap), leading a team of designers, content strategists, and user researchers to completely overhaul their product. Then a former client who knew what I could do recruited me as CMO at LevelUp, a smart technology and software product line for multifamily properties. I helped take them from zero revenue to millions.

In 2024, I went independent as a consultant and fractional CMO, wanting to get back to the world of smaller business services. I'd spent 20 years building the exact set of skills that founders of service firms need, but the only way to use them properly was to stop working for big companies. Or any companies. I wanted to be free to tell clients the truth. Free to walk away from engagements that don't serve them. Free to do what I actually believe is right, even when it's not the most profitable path.

Most of my clients are owners of service firms doing somewhere between $1M and $10M in revenue. Construction firms, IT consultancies, financial advisors, architecture studios, cybersecurity companies, design-build firms. They do excellent work. Their existing clients love them. But their marketing doesn't reflect any of that, and they know it.

The usual symptom: they're competing on price against firms that do worse work, because nothing in their website or proposals or sales materials explains why they're the better choice. Nobody ever figured out how to say it.

So that's what I do. Through research, interviews, and competitive analysis, I find what actually sets the firm apart, in terms that matter to the people buying, and I put it into language the whole business can use. Website. Proposals. Sales conversations. Content. Everything.

Once that's in place, the marketing starts attracting better prospects. The proposals start winning on value instead of price. And the team stops depending on the founder to walk into every room and explain the vision personally.