I taught myself graphic design when I was 14 so I could make my own report card. It didn’t work, but I got pretty good at Photoshop.
By 16 I was working nights at a local agency while still in high school, having learned the craft from an eventual advertising legend I’d been shadowing during school vacations at the agency where my mom worked. By 20 I was the youngest Art Director at BBDO, working on Super Bowl commercials during the two consecutive years we were named Agency of the Year. A prodigy, if you believe the people who were there. I mostly just worked faster than everyone else and never said no to a brief.
At BBDO I designed characters during the Emmy Award-winning second season of Blue’s Clues. I was the first person in the agency on the internet, building some of the first brand websites for M&Ms and Pepsi when most creatives still thought “digital” was a watch. I was also a junior art director on the Pepsi Harrier Jet campaign, the one that became a Netflix documentary. I was in the room for that.
Then I stopped waiting for the industry to catch up and started building the future myself.
I didn’t just join social media when it started. I founded one of the first social networks. AdHoles was a community for advertising professionals that grew to 10,000 members who were a who’s who of the industry. Won a Webby. An Ad Age Power 150 blog. Featured in The Wall Street Journal. For many people in advertising, it was the first social network they ever joined. Most people in marketing were still figuring out what a “wall post” was. I was already building the platform.
At Escalate, I combined social media and experiential marketing before anyone had a name for it, running campaigns for Coke Zero and winning Best of Show at the Word of Mouth Marketing Awards. At DiMassimo Goldstein, I led growth during their AdAge Small Agency of the Year run, coined their “brand direct” positioning, made them the first agency to accept cryptocurrency, and learned programmatic media before it trickled down to smaller agencies and brands. Then I wrote a book about it, because nobody else had.
I taught advertising creative at the School of Visual Arts. I led SCORE North Florida across 34 counties, mentoring the mentors. I won an International ANDY Award.
You’re starting to notice a pattern. Every wave that’s reshaped marketing in the last 30 years, I was there early. Not attending the webinar. Building the thing the webinar would eventually be about.
I’m in the top 0.1% of ChatGPT users, but that’s not even my main tool anymore. Behind my curtain, I’m running custom GPTs interfacing with each other like a creative Rube Goldberg machine. Agents talking to agents. Outputs feeding into rewrites feeding into hand-edits feeding into more prompts feeding into something that actually sounds like it came from a human who gives a damn. I built Minimum Viable Brand (mvb.cool), an AI-powered tool that extracts brand foundations from a single conversation. I created an entirely AI-produced sketch comedy series, Turn Your Head & Cough, because the best way to prove you understand a tool is to ship something with it that makes people laugh.
I’ve always done the work of five people. AI lets me do the work of 25. I replaced the time, cost, and interpersonal drama of working with a team: the missed deadlines, the passive-aggressive Slack messages, the “quick sync” that lasts ninety minutes, the revision spiral that never ends because someone’s nephew had “a few thoughts.” I redirected all of that energy into faster, better work.
That’s the business model. One senior operator. Strategy, creative, media, analytics, and AI. No agency overhead. No team to manage. No learning curve. The accumulated advantage of someone who’s been first to every wave for three decades, now armed with the tools that make it all scale.
I also open for nationally touring comedians and teach improv. Because the same instincts that make you funny: timing, reading the room, knowing what to cut, and understanding that good work isn’t about what you add but what you’re willing to murder: are the same ones that make you dangerous in a boardroom.
