I’ve sat on every side of the revenue table.

Most marketing executives come up through one function. They are brand people who find performance marketing crude, or performance people who find brand unmeasurable. I came up sideways — through retail sales, then supply chain planning, then agency ownership, then the CMO chair. Every one of those detours changed how I evaluate a marketing decision.

It started at a T-Mobile retail dealer in Michigan, managing a store in a high-volume mall and analysing inventory to forecast what we’d need in the weeks ahead. Then Enterprise Rent-A-Car, where I ran the branch marketing effort in Dearborn and grew the fleet 15% by winning local business accounts. That is unglamorous work, and it is the best commercial education available. You learn which objections actually kill a deal, which proof points actually move a buyer, and how fast a sales floor stops trusting marketing when the leads do not convert.

The five years after that were operations: material planning at Yazaki North America, then material sales planning at Shinola in Detroit — buying and forecasting every component that went into a watch. Running production plans six months out against demand signals teaches you something marketing rarely teaches: that a campaign driving volume you cannot fulfil profitably is not a success. It is an expensive apology to your customers. My strategies account for margin, unit economics, and inventory because I have been the person on the other end when they do not.

In 2016 I co-founded Rare Branding in Orange County — SEO, paid search, web development, brand work. Two years later it merged with another fast-growing OC agency to form Bastion Rare, where I served as Co-CEO. That period gave me the technical craft layer. I can audit your site architecture, your organic search strategy, your ad account structure, and your brand system with real precision instead of taking a vendor’s word for it — because I have owned the agency on the other side of that conversation, and I know exactly which parts of the invoice are real work.

Since 2020 I have run Klout Consulting Group, working as a fractional CMO with medium and large companies. In practice that means being a senior member of the client’s leadership team: defining the marketing plan, directing internal SEO, PPC, content, email, and social teams, owning campaign budget and monthly reallocation, building lead follow-up cadences alongside sales leadership, partnering with the CEO on operating reviews and board packages, and working with finance to set KPIs and forecast results. The constraint in most marketing organisations is not talent or budget. It is the absence of anyone senior enough to make the hard calls and own them.

I am based in Irvine, California, and I work remotely with companies across Southern California, Chicago, New York, and Texas.