How I got here

I started in South Africa, in a B2B manufacturing company, doing business development. I kept noticing that I could move more product by going further up the funnel — a better email, a cleaner website, a blog post that actually answered the question. So I did that instead. Nobody told me it was called copywriting. I thought I invented it.¹

I didn't. But figuring it out from first principles, in a market that wasn't flooded with courses and frameworks, meant I learned the hard way — which turns out to be the way that sticks.

Eventually I went out on my own. For the better part of a decade I worked with hundreds of businesses — startups, small businesses, scrappy orgs with big ambitions and no infrastructure. I built email funnels, websites, media kits, content strategies. Whatever the business needed, I figured out how to build it. That era made me fast, resourceful, and very good at diagnosing problems that don't have obvious names yet.

Since then: food and DTC, healthcare-adjacent, a genuinely complicated B2B2C business that worked like Uber for housecleaning, and B2B media. Each one taught me something the previous one didn't. I've managed communications to gig workers, end consumers, and enterprise property partners — sometimes for the same campaign. I've stabilized orgs through founder loss, funding pivots, and leadership turnover. I've built programs from scratch and inherited ones held together with duct tape and goodwill.

I got the MBA because I was already making Director-level decisions and wanted the vocabulary to match. It confirmed what I suspected: most marketing problems are operations problems in disguise.² I'm based in Portland, Oregon. I work remotely. I'm looking for a role where the scope is real, the authority matches it, and someone occasionally appreciates a very good subject line.

One more thing worth naming: I've never managed a large team on paper. I've spent fifteen years learning how to make teams work without that luxury — hiring well, onboarding carefully, giving feedback clearly, and knowing when to make the hard call about who shouldn't be in the room. I've directed contractors, restructured agency relationships, mentored junior designers, and led cross-functional programs with no formal authority over anyone involved. It turns out that leading without authority is harder than leading with it. I'd rather have the authority. But I know I can operate without it.