For six years, I volunteered as the Section Director for Gold Coast FBLA. The biggest event each year was a one-day conference for two thousand students, and I was the one holding the whole thing together.

I won a signed print from an upstart local art museum, went to pick it up, and left as its head of marketing. Over the next five years, that turned into exhibit launches, virtual galleries, and a lot of fun little projects nobody had a playbook for.

I wanted to make a "Hard Knocks" for local high school football. The only problem was that I worked in advertising, not the newsroom. So we built a sponsorship that gave me another way in.

An old armory in Tacoma. Three DJs, a legend headlining, and a stage built from concept art. The hard part wasn’t the show. It was getting a city 1,100 miles away to care about a party thrown by people they’d never heard of.

Most marketers want a bigger list. I cut ours by 95%. Then I rebuilt how an entire public company understood where its revenue came from. This is the kind of unglamorous work I actually love.

A winery, a brewery, a distillery, and an event space. Four brands, four domains, one seamless site that a non-technical staffer could run themselves. I built it, shot the photos, and wired it so it would run for years.

Everyone had opinions about the creator economy. I helped give the industry numbers to argue with: surveys, reports, press coverage, and research people started looking forward to year after year.

Our whole pitch was that businesses should pay for your attention. So I built a mailer that did exactly that. You opened it, and there were two real dollars inside. The trick wasn't the gimmick. It was the local growth engine the gimmick was just the front door to.

I started in advertising sales at the Ventura County Star. Before long, I was building a video business from scratch, handling everything from the sales pitch to the final edit. It was content marketing before anyone called it that.

I was part of the team that pitched the business, then spent years leading the content strategy for a Fortune 100 insurer. More than a million subscribers, executive stakeholders on both sides, and a program that had to keep proving its value.

Most trade show booths are built to tell people what a company does. We built ours to give people a reason to stop first. The result was fewer cold pitches and a lot more real conversations.

A product relaunch, a new creator marketplace, and executive communications, all at once. Most companies would send a press release. We built a broadcast instead.

In college I produced a behind-the-scenes television series. I convinced places like Cirque du Soleil to let us behind the scenes, then carried each episode from concept through post-production.

How do you get attention at the world’s biggest advertising festival without the world’s biggest advertising budget? You don’t compete for a spot in the marina. You create your own.

I was answering the live chat on our website when a stranger from London started asking questions. It turned into one of the best conversations I’d had in months. I didn’t know it yet, but it would help reshape the company.