2009 — The MySpace Era
It started with custom profile pages.
While everyone else was picking a profile song, I was in the code: custom MySpace layouts for bands and small businesses, and fliers for fraternity events on the side. That's where I learned the lesson that still drives everything I build: design gets attention, but systems keep it.
That work got me hired at Inkblot, the University of Nevada, Reno's in-house design department. My love for graphic design and web design grew there, and I moved up the ranks to creative director.
The Design Years
Design turned into marketing.
Every project kept running into the same question: "This looks great, but how do I get customers from it?" Answering it pulled me from design into everything around it. I led and created content for local political campaigns, a land banking company, and a direct mail house, and along the way I stopped being the guy who made things look good and became the guy who made things work.
That's the era that built the toolbox: web design, video production, photography, webinars, presentations, direct mail, and the stagecraft of live events. Nothing on the list was theory. Every skill got learned because a real client needed it shipped.
Strategy decks don't grow businesses. Shipped work does.
The Operator Years
Then I started running the whole machine.
The past decade I've worked embedded with entrepreneurs and established companies, owning functions most businesses split across entire teams. Lead on projects where I was directing teams, vendors, and outcomes before breakfast. Marketing and sales for a national health brand, where our YouTube channel grew to 56,000 subscribers and Instagram passed 40,000 followers. Media and marketing alongside names like Loral Langemeier and Kevin Harrington.
Running the whole machine teaches you what no agency retainer ever will: where marketing actually breaks. It breaks in the handoffs. Between the website and the email list. Between the content and the follow-up. Between the idea and the execution.
Now
Same craft. New leverage.
Today I layer AI on top of 20 years of doing this by hand. Not AI as a gimmick, AI as the thing that lets one experienced operator run what used to take a department: content production, email nurture, site care, and the automation connecting it all.
The kid customizing MySpace pages and the guy building AI marketing systems are doing the same job: making sure your business is the one people notice, remember, and buy from.