The long version.

I grew up in Erie, Pennsylvania, and for a while I drove a delivery truck for the Pepsi-Cola Company. It is a fine job. It was not going to be my job.

Before I left it I was broke in the specific way that is hard to explain to people who have not been — the kind where you put things back at the register. I have written about that period more honestly in Phoenix Formula than I will here, because the book had room for it.

In 2006 I quit. I have described it since as firing my Pepsi truck, which makes it sound more decisive than it felt. What followed was several years of learning marketing the expensive way: by getting it wrong on my own money first, then getting it right often enough that people started paying me to do it for them.

What I actually do

Three things, and they feed each other. I run Done For You, a marketing agency that builds and operates sales funnels, ad campaigns and marketing automation for companies that want the result rather than the education.

I build software, because agencies discover the same gaps over and over and eventually one of them is worth solving properly. That is where Axis came from, and most of what I have shipped since.

And I write. Three books so far, each about a part of the work that turned out to be teachable rather than personal.

How I think about this work

Most marketing advice fails because it is a tactic detached from a system. A hook that worked for someone else, dropped into a funnel that cannot support it, measured against a number that does not matter. The useful unit is the whole machine: what brings people in, what happens next, what makes them buy, and what keeps them.

Almost everything I have built is an attempt to make that machine visible to the person who owns it. That is what the books are for, what the software is for, and what the agency does when a client would rather I ran it.