My first real job was as an EMT in East Detroit, a city that has since renamed itself Eastpointe. The work taught me something I still rely on: figure out what is actually wrong, say it calmly, and act before everyone else has finished reacting. No one called it marketing, but a good deal of what I know about marketing began there.
Then I studied network architecture, which is largely the study of what fails when everyone arrives at once. Websites behave much the same way on the morning an advertisement goes live.
Then biotech, marketing biological samples to federal laboratories. One of the best sellers was dog urine. It was an early lesson that nearly anything can be sold well if it is taken seriously and described honestly.
Then ten years at Haley Mechanical, a 13-person home services company that grew to $25 million and 150+ employees before it was acquired. For most of that decade I was the entire marketing department. Today I am at Apex Service Partners, helping 50+ brands across 90+ locations sound like themselves and appear when someone nearby needs them.
If your business sits somewhere between 13 people and $25 million, that is the stretch I know best. Here is how I help.
Inside my empty bottle I was constructing a lighthouse while all the others were making ships.
Charles Simic
For longer than any of that, I have written. Poems, mostly in the company of Charles Simic, Bill Knott, and Richard Brautigan. Essays about places the country has not quite gotten around to tearing down: a ghost-town cemetery up north, a Michigan Stonehenge in the woods (opens in a new window), a giant wizard selling souvenirs in Disney's shadow (opens in a new window). I photograph the same kind of thing.
I am also a Dharma student of Korean Zen and a certified meditation teacher. Mostly that means I am better than I used to be at sitting still, and at not saying the first thing that occurs to me.
It looks like several careers. I think of it as one habit: looking at what is in front of me until it becomes clear what it is. That turns out to be a reasonable way to write a poem, and a very good way to run a marketing department.