Rivers, classrooms, and fifteen years of marketing leadership.

Before marketing

I started my career as a whitewater river guide — eleven seasons on the Rogue, the Main Salmon, and the Klamath River. Guiding teaches you to read conditions that change by the minute, keep a group calm through the loud parts, and get everyone downstream better off than they started.

Then I spent six years teaching high school English and journalism and coaching varsity soccer. Which teaches you the same things only indoors (except the soccer part).

Fifteen years of marketing leadership

Those turned out to be the job skills.

I've spent the last fifteen years applying them to marketing and digital strategy — first at a conversion-optimization agency, where I co-authored Stop Marketing, Start Selling, then leading strategy and marketing practices across agencies in Portland and beyond. Along the way I've:

• Rebuilt a ten-person team through a pandemic

• Led an agency's B Corp certification

• Directed global digital strategy for a multi-billion-dollar environmental science brand across 33 countries

• Relaunched Providence Health Plan's digital presence — digital enrollments up 244%

Now: an independent practice in Bend

Today I run an independent marketing and digital strategy practice in Bend.

The most recent flagship engagement: Director of Strategy & Growth at Monumental, a Shopify-focused growth agency, where I owned revenue health, client strategy, and the operating systems that make growth predictable. That work included the analysis that surfaced $14M+ in misattributed channel revenue for a single Shopify Plus merchant — five years of email-driven revenue that broken UTM tagging had been crediting to direct and organic.