About

I got my first real marketing job by accident. I didn't know what an SIC code was, or how an insurance agency worked, and I had about a week to figure out both before I was expected to run email campaigns for 250 clients. That week taught me something I still believe even today. That most of what people call a “marketing problem” isn't really about marketing. It's about not knowing what's happening underneath each layer supporting the campaign.

Since then, I've spent twelve years chasing that same question inside much bigger rooms. A national company where the digital marketing budget ran into the tens of millions, a stalled technology project that had already eaten six figures before I inherited it, a business unit operating across three countries with almost no local support. While the size of the problem changed, the core question never did.

Why are we so eager to spend money on something that doesn't work?

In one stretch, that question turned a marketing budget that had never been able to prove its own value into one that grew attributed revenue tenfold over five years. In another, it meant finding the vendor who'd been underdelivering for months and replacing them fast enough to still hit a deadline everyone else had already written off.

None of it happened alone, either. I've built teams from scratch more than once, and the part I'm proudest of isn't any single number, it's the people who grew out of their box and in some cases surpassed me, taking on larger responsibilities at much larger organizations such as Boeing. Building those legacies is what I'm most proud of.

I write about all of this, because the same questions keep showing up in different rooms with different people, and writing them down is the only way I've found to actually think them through.