The POV
Here's what I know.
Most founders don't have a strategy problem. They have a "nobody in this room is going to say the thing" problem. The agency is doing its best, but the pieces aren't quite fitting together. The marketing lead is smart and capable, but stretched thin. The spend keeps going up, the growth has stagnated, and nobody can quite explain why. Everyone sees it. Nobody's saying it.
I learned early that the most valuable thing you can bring to a founder or executive isn't another problem. Everyone's already walking through the door with those. What they need is a path forward, preferably with three potential solutions.
I'm not just an operator. I'm a builder. I've worked hand in hand with founders, agency owners, presidents, and CEOs. I've built teams from scratch, restructured agency relationships, launched new channels before they were mainstream, and sat in the room where the hard decisions get made.
I've spent 14 years working alongside brilliant people, navigating real complexity. My job isn't to tear down what you've built or replace the people around you. It's to figure out what's actually in the way, say it out loud, and help you move forward.
On the state of the market.
Most businesses are wasting money. Not carelessly, and rarely without good reason for the decisions that got them here. But wasting it nonetheless.
The math on agency relationships is harder than it looks. A brand doing $30k a month in revenue, paying a $10k retainer plus ad spend fees, has already spent itself into a corner before a single customer clicks. A brand spending $25M a year in media and paying $60-85k a month to an agency is funding an infrastructure that could be replicated in-house for a fraction of the cost with the right leadership. Neither situation is entirely the agency's fault. But neither founder has someone in their corner doing that math out loud.
The measurement problem makes it worse. Most brands are making decisions based on platform reporting that tells them what it's incentivized to tell them. The real question isn't where the click came from — it's understanding the true weight and impact of each effort on the business as a whole. That picture looks different depending on how many channels you sell through, how your customer acquires and returns, and what your unit economics actually are. The tools exist to get closer to the truth. Most founders don't know to ask for them, and many agencies don't offer them without being pushed. So everyone keeps optimizing for the number they can see, and wondering why the business isn't growing the way the dashboard suggests it should.
And underneath all of it is a tension that rarely gets named: the people closest to the problem are often the least positioned to say what's wrong. Not because they don't see it. Because they have something to lose by saying it. That's where an outside perspective stops being a luxury and starts being the point.
On how I think.
I think about business end to end. From the first brand touchpoint to the first delivery to the second purchase. From the ad creative to the unboxing experience to the review that gets left or doesn't. I think about who the consumer is, why they care, and what makes a brand worthy of their attention. Because attention is our most finite resource, and most brands are wasting it.
I've worked across every aspect of marketing and enough of business to know that the problems are rarely where people think they are. My job is to find them, say them out loud, and help you do something about it.
Sound familiar?
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