I help small businesses figure out what they're actually selling, then build the brand and the marketing that makes it land. Twenty years in newsrooms, agencies, and in-house teams. One brain, no account managers.
If you can't say in one sentence who you're for and what you do, no mark in the world will fix it. Naming and positioning come first; the visual is the thing that makes them memorable, not the thing that makes them true.
Every strong brand has something it refuses to be. Find what your customers are quietly tired of in your category, and stand on the other side of it. "We're the X, but for Y" is a starting point, not a finish line.
Cheap pricing brings you cheap clients. The right number isn't the highest one you can defend — it's the one that filters for the kind of work you want to be doing in five years.
It's an argument. It exists to convince one specific person, in about ten seconds, that you understand the thing they came here trying to do. Most homepages talk about the company. Better ones talk about the customer.
This is true for the company, the product, the campaign, and the email. The discipline isn't writing short. It's knowing which sentence is the one that has to land, and being willing to throw out the four that don't.
You can't write about the company until the company knows what it is. Half the about pages I read are a record of the founder's identity crisis. Get the homepage right first; the about page will write itself.
Most small businesses are drowning in dashboards. Pick three numbers that genuinely tell you whether the brand is working — usually some version of who's coming in, who's coming back, and what they're worth — and watch those.
I cap the practice on purpose. Bigger doesn't mean better; it usually means meetings about meetings. Small means I can do the work, charge fairly, and give every client the brain they hired, not the team that was assigned.
A deliberate cap. The same brain scopes, writes, and ships every engagement. No team to scale, no account managers between us. If your email lands in my inbox, it is read by me.
I'm a creative director and marketing leader. Twenty years in newsrooms, agencies, and in-house teams.
I run a small advisory practice from Raleigh, North Carolina. Capped at twenty active clients, by design.
Outside the work: a wife, two kids, a dog with opinions, and a slowly-improving relationship with the smoker on the back porch. In that order.
The work is above. If something here resonates, send me a URL.