I Didn’t Build My Career by Staying in One Lane.
I started in digital marketing in 2009. Since then, I’ve spent most of my career learning what happens when websites, advertising, leads, sales, technology, and real business problems all collide.
I Started With the Stuff You Could Actually Touch.
Websites. SEO. Social media. Digital advertising. The hands-on work that makes something either function or not function.
In 2009, I joined Cosens Martial Arts while the company was still a single-location business. At first, my job was pretty simple: help people find us online and help the business grow.
Then it did.
One Location Became Nine.
Growth made the job a lot more interesting.
Every new location meant another market, another audience, another advertising budget, another website experience, another sales team, and another opportunity for something to go wrong.
At some point, I wasn’t just doing marketing anymore. I was building the system behind it.I eventually took responsibility for marketing across all nine locations, directing roughly $30,000 per month in digital advertising during peak periods and building the infrastructure that connected campaigns to leads, follow-up, appointments, payments, sales, and measurement.
The Ad Was Almost Never the Whole Problem.
When results were bad, it was tempting to blame the campaign.
But sometimes the ad was fine and the landing page was weak. Sometimes the landing page worked and the follow-up didn’t. Sometimes people booked and didn’t show. Sometimes they showed and nobody sold them. Sometimes the tracking was wrong. Sometimes one market behaved completely differently from another for no obvious reason.
So I learned to stop looking at individual marketing tactics in isolation.
I learned to follow the customer all the way through the business.That meant building landing pages, CRM workflows, automated follow-up, scheduling systems, payment flows, tracking, reporting, campaign frameworks, and the operating processes around all of it.
I Never Wanted to Become the Guy Who Only Talks About the Work.
The farther I moved into strategy and leadership, the more important it became to me to stay close to the actual work.
I still build landing pages. I still troubleshoot websites. I still dig through campaign data. I still build automations. I still test offers. I still trace broken tracking and weird conversion problems.
That’s probably the part of my career I value most.
I can talk about the big picture because I’ve spent years inside the little details that make the big picture work.
AI Made the Work More Interesting, Not Less Human.
Marketing technology has changed dramatically since I started.
Today I use AI and automation for customer communication, knowledge retrieval, follow-up, workflow design, internal efficiency, and solving problems that would have required far more manual effort a few years ago.
But I don’t care about using technology just because it’s new.
The question is always the same: does this actually make the business better?After years of solving complicated marketing problems inside a growing business, I realized a lot of small businesses need something much simpler: someone experienced enough to look at the whole picture.
Most Business Owners Don’t Need More Marketing Noise.
They usually have a real problem.
Maybe the website is old or broken. Maybe the ads aren’t producing. Maybe Google looks terrible. Maybe leads are coming in and nobody knows what happens to them. Maybe there’s a project they’ve been putting off for six months because they don’t even know who to call.
Sometimes the answer is a full marketing system.
Sometimes the answer is fixing one stupid thing.
I like both.
Give Me the Problem.
You don’t need to know the right service, the right software, or the right marketing terminology.
Tell me what’s happening. I’ll help you figure out what actually matters.
Talk to Chris