ABOUT
The story goes a little something like this.
In ninth grade a teacher went around the room asking what we wanted to be when we grew up. Doctor. Lawyer. Firefighter. Every answer got a nod. Then she got to me and I said “rich,” and the whole room laughed. They thought I was joking. I wasn’t. I just didn’t have the words yet for what I meant, which was that I wanted to build things that were mine. I dropped out not long after that. My real education was about to start.
It started at a gas station. I was eighteen, pumping gas, when a brand new Lexus pulled in. The kind of car that told you the driver had figured out something the rest of us hadn’t. Most people would have watched him fill up and gone home. I walked over and asked him straight out, “Will you show me how to be rich?”
He didn’t laugh. He turned out to be the founder of one of the fastest growing telecom companies in America, and he pointed me to my start. A few years later I was the youngest executive director in that company’s history. People assume the money was the prize. The money was nice. Watching how that man thought was the prize.
From there I ran a national dating company. Seventeen offices, real interviews, printed profiles in binders. No apps, no swiping, no algorithm deciding anything. So I learned what makes a person say yes the old way, sitting across a desk, thousands of times, with my own money riding on every ad. I was tracking every lead and every close in spreadsheets I built by hand, years before Google Analytics existed. Marketers have fancy names for all of that now. Back then I just called it knowing where my money went.
I’ll tell you the other part too, because it belongs in the story. I’ve built companies and sold them. I’ve also been pushed out of things I helped build, by people I trusted, more than once. It broke something in me for a while. I hit a real bottom, put the bottle down, and rebuilt myself before I rebuilt anything else. I don’t dress that chapter up. It’s also the reason I can sit with a business owner and understand what’s really going on. You can’t diagnose a wound you’ve never had.
Somewhere in those years a law firm came to me paying about two thousand dollars to bring in a single case. Everyone treated that number like the weather, just something you live with. When we finished rebuilding how they got clients, it was under a hundred dollars a case and the firm’s revenue had doubled. Real numbers, and I can still walk you through every step. That’s the day this agency really started, even though it didn’t have a name yet.
Now, about the team. You won’t find forty headshots on this site. I’ve been building automated marketing systems my whole career, long before AI was something people talked about at dinner. Today I run this agency with a floor of AI employees trained on thirty years of my own wins and scars. Researchers, analysts, writers, media buyers. They work around the clock, they never pad an invoice, and they don’t have egos, which frankly puts them ahead of a few agencies I’ve competed against. The machines give you the output of a big shop. The judgment about what’s actually wrong with your business, and whether to tell you something you won’t enjoy hearing, still comes from one stubborn human.
Well, one and a half. There is one other person behind this agency, a partner I trust completely and won’t be naming, because who he is matters less than what he means. After a lifetime of learning the difference between a handshake and the real thing, I ended up with the real thing. He backs me when something needs backing. So when I tell you we can see a project through, whatever it turns out to require, that isn’t optimism talking. It’s arithmetic.
I still hold stakes in several businesses, which changes how this agency works in one important way. I don’t need your project. I need it to work. That’s the only reason left to take it.
Home is Southwest Florida these days, but my best work doesn’t happen there. It happens at our place on the Georgia coast, where shrimp boats outnumber stop lights. Most evenings you’ll find me on the water or cruising out to Sapelo Island, walking the beach with my wife Stephanie and our two dogs, Georgia and Lola, who are either asleep at my feet or losing their minds at a pelican. That beach doesn’t care what anyone’s conversion rate is. Every good idea I’ve had in the last few years showed up somewhere between the dock and the sand.
And somewhere out there, it finally landed on me. The kid in that classroom said “rich” and a whole room laughed. It took me the rest of my life to learn what the word meant. It was never the monthly income, staggering as it felt at the time. It wasn’t the companies I scaled or the ones I sold. It’s a good woman beside me, two dogs at my feet, a river to watch the boats come in on, and work I believe in enough to tell people the truth about it. By that measure, I finally got there. Which is exactly why I’m so careful about whose projects I take.
So that’s the story. You’ve probably decided by now that I’m either full of it or the real thing. Fair enough. There’s only one way to know.
Let’s find out.