My Career Journey

Expertise

Marketing strategy, planning, and execution
Go-to-market planning / Product team collaboration
Search Engine Optimization
Digital Advertising - Google Ads, Display, Programmatic
Optimize marketing processes and service delivery
P/L management and profitability improvement
Buyer persona and buying cycle segmentation

Google Analytics 4 and Google Search Console
Team leadership and collaboration
Negotiating and closing deals
Managing remote workforce
Maximize profitability on ad spend
Leveraging AI in marketing operations
Marketing automation

1997 - The Start

2005 - Brick & Mortar

2008 - On the Road

2009 - First Agency

2012 - Making Partner

I Created My First Promotion and Job Title

My first year out of college I sold mechanical postage meters. Dressed in a suit and tie, I parked my car on the waterfront of Old Town Alexandria and cold visited businesses on foot. Oh, the rejection! Still, it taught me some valuable lessons, like perseverance, and leveraging failure for future wins.

In 1997 I landed a sales job at PSINet selling corporate internet connectivity. My job was to sell through value added resellers - VARs. I was the inside counterpart to an outside rep, and we dominated. Our region was always at the top of the White Board.

In dealing with a couple hundred VARs, I heard common complaints. Commission payments were slow, and inaccurate. I was told on many occasions that we lost sales because other carriers paid better.

I made a plan. I documented case after case of program mismanagement and laid out the groundwork for how to fix it. I remember asking some more experienced friends what shapes to use in my flow chart, which seems funny to me now.

So, I sat down in front of Joe, the VP of Sales and made my pitch: Let me run the VAR program, make me a manager, and I'll double the revenue by next year.

It worked.

I was named the Channel Marketing Manager. The program changes I made were a huge success and rolled out nationally. We did indeed start seeing a nice revenue payoff, but by the summer of 2000, PSINet was in real trouble. The Internet bubble of the late 90's had burst.

A snippet from my end-of-year performance review from 1999...

2005: I Built My First Business in an Unlikely Industry

As far back as 2003 I was running Google Ads for affiliate programs. The process was simple: run ads for a product, link to the product wesbite, get paid a commission on any resulting sale.

At the time, I was dating my soon-to-be wife, who was a massage therapist and estetician. It was because of Melissa that I learned about La Mer Skin Cream, which at the time sold for about $230 for a little jar ($230!). I found that as a SkinStore affiliate, I could get 15% commissions. With $0.05 clicks in Google "Adwords" I could sell La Mer and make about $30 for each jar.

And I sold a ton of it.

I quickly found many other high-end products and began marketing them. I devoured all my wife's books on skincare and learned enough to credibly position the products in the right ads, and collect commissions on the resulting sales.

I was expert at running ad campaigns to skincare product sites and collecting nice commissions. I'd become an armchair marketer, this was all at night, after my long office days.

Fast forward to 2005. I was a newlywed and I got to know more about the daily grind of my wife's business. Melissa had a little studio set up in the town house, and skincare and massage clients came over most days (I didn't like this). She would often go on "out calls" where she lugged a massage table to a client's home.

It didn't take long for me to start asking lots of pointed questions:

What's your margin on each client?
What is the lifetime value of a new client?
How much does it cost to get a new client?
What is your best source of new business?
How do you factor for travel time?

Melissa didn't know the answers to most of my questions. But through it all, in that first year we were married, I somehow convinced her to open a massage and skincare center.

And we did.

Spartaworks Massage and Skincare was created around the kitchen table. After we incorporated, we got to work. Secured a new space with 6 treatment rooms. Worked through the build out. Hired about 10 massage therapists. Built a new website. Hired contractors for linens, cleaning, supplies, and services for point-of-sale charges and appointment management.

Spartaworks was a huge learning experience. The business is still thriving over 20 years later. It is now moved to a different location and has spawned Wellbody Healing, which provides yoga classes, sound baths, and all kinds of holistic healing. My role is now purely as an advisor. Melissa has become a dynamite small business owner.

2008-2009: My Life on the Road as an SEO Evangelist

In 2008 Network Solutions had a bold plan to send about 65 high level sales consultants into the field to sell the newly-created Search Engine Optimization (SEO) product. The challenge was that few people at Network Solutions understood SEO, and fewer still were able to explain it.

I had been running the Affiliate Program for NetSol, and many in the company knew that I had a "side hustle" running optimized affiliate websites in the skincare sector. With my success in the Affiliate Program, and my experience with SEO, I was tapped to figure out a way to drive leads for our soon-to-be-hired direct sales force.

The Network Solutions SEO Seminar Series was born.

I created a full day seminar that walked attendees through the process of SEO from understanding their business goals all the way to link building. This was a college course on SEO, delivered in about 8 hours.

At the end of each seminar, attendees had a fantastic understanding of SEO, but most wanted nothing to do with executing on it.

Enter our outside sales executives. We found that in each seminar ranging from 50 to 500 attendees, about 10% could be converted into new SEO clients for Network Solutions.

I spent about 2 years going to one or two cities a week to deliver the seminar, and worked with the sales teams to help close deals.

This led to other speaking engagements. Here I am on the stage sandwiched between Microsoft and Google. They were nice guys, but questions mostly came my way, as I was the guy with actionable advice for the small business owners in attendance.

2009-2012: The Second Business I Built, My First Marketing Agency

In the Summer of 2009 I got word that the outside sales operation for Network Solutions was being disbanded. It was simply too expensive to keep that many sales executives in the field. Although the SEO Seminar Series was itself a success, the sales organization it supported was not performing. My role was no longer needed.

I didn't miss a day of work.

I had spent a couple of years traveling the country and talking to business owners, marketers, entrepreneurs, and even other SEOs. I had a pretty nice network built up. The day I was laid off I went for a long run along the W&OD trail in northern Virginia. On that run I decided that I was going to build my own SEO empire. Search First Internet Marketing was born.

I signed my first 4 clients in the first couple weeks and by the end of the first year I had about 25 SEO clients. It wasn't long until other opportunities came like website design projects, managing ad accounts, and email campaigns.

I did it all. Long days and nights of work and I got it done, but I had also found my limit.

While at NetSol, I worked closely with a contracted team, who was building out a new blog property. Now, a year into my new company, I called on my old friends to see if they could help. They could.

I learned how to hire and manage an off-shore marketing operations team.

I found a way to programmatically deploy SEO programs by creating systems and checklists for my new off-shore team. By creating automations and rules-based checks, I could have the remote team handle daily ads management and monthly SEO tasks.

2012-Present: Using One Business to Build Another.

By 2012 Search First was running nicely. With three young kids at home I had created a perfect lifestyle business.

One day I got a call from an old college friend. Turns out he was running a marketing agency in the same geography, only his agency was much bigger than mine. He wanted to explore hiring me to help with some of his overflow work.

I took a few clients from him as a paid consultant. But it was only a few months before we both realized that we'd be stronger together. We had a good business relationship and a similar vision.

Using my client base as an equity buy-in I became a Partner at Conversion Pipeline. From 2012 to present, Conversion Pipeline is a thriving full service agency.