I’m Eric Chapman, writer and marketing director based in Howell, Michigan. I started as an EMT in East Detroit, where sirens split the heat and decisions came in seconds. Triage before strategy. Bedside voice before brand voice. I learned to read a room’s pulse, to speak calm into chaos, to move when others froze.
Later I studied network architecture: how systems crack under pressure, how signal survives noise. That logic became the frame for everything after. Today I build growth strategies for home services companies across the Midwest. Clear plans, clean copy, results that hold.
I’m a Dharma student of Korean Zen. It teaches me to listen long and speak little, to stay out of my own way. I write poems shaped by Charles Simic, Bill Knott, and Richard Brautigan. My essays map roadside America: fiberglass giants and wizard storefronts, stone circles and small-town graves that carry forgotten names. My street photographs hunt the instant before it knows it’s seen.
Sometimes the three trades share a pocket. I still chase pulse, whether it hums in a funnel, a sentence, or a stranger’s face caught in alley light.
Inside my empty bottle I was constructing a lighthouse while all the others were making ships. — Charles Simic
The Long Way Around
The resume is not a straight line. Before home services there was biotech: running marketing for a company that sold biological samples to federal labs, dog urine among them. The profit margin was wild. Good marketing in that world required knowing how to sell, which turned out to be excellent preparation for everything that followed.
I am a full-spectrum marketer. Brand strategy, paid media, content, SEO, email, agency management, analytics, team building. I have lived in all of it, not visited. I helped a 13-person startup reach $25 million in revenue and 130 employees before acquisition, as the sole marketing hire. Today I run operations for 50+ brands at Apex Service Partners, where scale is the only constant and short-term tricks are a cardinal sin.
The writing runs parallel and always has. A chapbook manuscript. A Substack. Essays about protest costuming, Pere Cheney Cemetery, Buddhist philosophy, and whatever else won’t leave me alone. Photographs of vanishing grain elevators and empty Midwestern main streets. The work is about attention, which is also what good marketing is about.
The three trades are not as separate as they look.