This is How a Brochure from 1996 Redefined My Career

My path to becoming a fractional CMO started in a community college computer lab in the mid-nineties. A lab manager, tired of watching me play video games between classes, slapped down an HTML brochure and told me to make myself useful. This was before Google or YouTube existed, when businesses needed websites but had no idea how to get them. Learning HTML quickly made me one of the few people who could help. My freelance web work turned into branding and messaging projects, which accidentally evolved into running a full marketing agency for twelve years. Growing up licking stamps for my dad’s roofing company direct mail campaigns had given me an instinctive understanding of marketing that most designers lacked.

After twelve years of agency success, the limitations became clear. Agencies always remain slightly outside the real action, never going deep enough to truly transform a business. Selling to an international digital agency opened the door to in-house roles: head of design at a software company, product director at a tech firm, then six years as CMO for a funded startup. Each role provided different perspectives on how marketing really works from the inside. But corporate life meant dealing with politics, sluggishness, and the same repetitive cycles that drain creative energy over time.

When my CMO role ended, the choice was clear. Flying around the country for interviews, competing for roles that would require relocation to random cities, and landing in another corporate environment held no appeal. Twenty-five years of experience across freelance, agency, and corporate worlds had taught me everything I needed to succeed independently. Rather than sending out PDFs and hoping for the next job, I chose to bet on myself. The conversation with my wife confirmed it: we were done putting our fate in other people’s hands, and I would go fully independent as a fractional CMO.