Story.

I was the kid who fixed the neighborhood's computers. Ten years old, deep in Macworld and Wired, weirdly obsessed with Palm Pilots. The other half of me lived in comic books and Dylan records, learning how a story holds a person still.

Marketing turned out to be the job where both halves count.

The writer years

The first stamp in the passport was the Vatican Museums, a college internship in Rome that stretched into something longer. Then executive search: packaging candidates for boards, building a case somebody else had to defend in a room I wasn't in. A story with evidence attached, or it didn't work.

Then high-volume consumer editorial at Brad's Deals, writing headlines for an eight-figure monthly audience with live traffic grading every one of them. A sentence either earns attention or it doesn't, and the numbers are never polite about which.

In 2015 I came through the search-and-content door as the first dedicated digital marketing hire, into a company that had no analytics to argue with yet. The middle of what followed is the part I like telling. Near-$0 to board-backed marketing function built from scratch. 2 offshore contributors at the start, 4 direct reports inside a 16-person international model across the U.S., Canada, Guatemala, India, and the Philippines at the end.

The building started well before the AI era. As Director I oversaw the creation and 2018 launch of Rocket Receivables, TSI's first direct-to-buyer e-commerce product and the first of its kind in the ARM industry. It earned seven-figure revenue in its first year.

Along the way I ran marketing integration for 7 acquisitions, including a regulated Canadian business unit whose compliance requirements I learned and then operationalized. Somewhere in the middle I taught myself to code, which changed the job more than any promotion did. Where I once wrote a requirements doc and waited two quarters, I now build the workflow myself, with human approval gates and audit trails attached.

Mr. B

Tom Bedecarre, the founder of AKQA, was my mentor and something like a second father. He wrote radio spots and print ads that ran in The New York Times, then turned around and built digital campaigns for Nike and the Halo games. I watched him and understood the job I wanted: tell great stories, and build the machinery that carries them.

The operator now

The latest chapter is the one this site documents. I run marketing and GTM for TSI as acting CMO, and I build the AI operating layer underneath it with my own hands.

I still tell stories people remember. The systems are how I make them true.

The mechanics have their own chapter: how I work, in eleven operating chapters.

Off the clock

• [ Home · ON · 2025 ]

  Married Kristin in Rome.

  We got married in Rome in November 2025. Italian weddings have a way of stretching across days, and ours did, in the best way.

  Most of what's good in my life now traces back to Kristin. The easy stuff and the hard stuff, both.

• [ Dogs · Active ]

  A three-dog household.

  Sophie is 16 and dignified. Henry is 2 and convinced he's the protagonist. Lulu is 3 months and learning that gravity exists.

  The energy ranges from wise elder to tiny chaos gremlin, sometimes inside the same hour.

• [ Family · Constant ]

  Oldest of five.

  I have four siblings and two parents who live a short drive away in the North Shore. Big family means a packed table at every holiday and someone always in the group chat.

  My nephew George is 5, and we've started building Lego sets together. Turns out 5 is the right age to be slightly competitive about following the instructions.

• [ Course · 7.8 · GHIN ]

  Golf at a 7.8 index.

  Currently playing to a 7.8. Look me up on GHIN. Just put the new Titleist T-100 irons in the bag and they're already finding fairways I didn't know about.

  Best round? Doesn't matter much. Worst round? Healing slowly.

• [ Kitchen · Daily ]

  Most nights, dinner.

  I cook for Kristin and me almost every night. It's the part of the day I get to slow down without trying.

  We also eat our way around Chicago when we can. There's no shortage of good rooms in this city, and we're making a small dent.

• [ Field · On rotation ]

  Sport and the gym.

  Liverpool FC and Chicago sports, with all the unreasonable hope that requires.

  Lifting clears my head and keeps the rest of the machine from getting weird. The gym is calendar armor.

The rest of it is photographs: a few rolls of film, screened into the manual's ink until you press one.

Stamps

• Rome, Florence, Milan, the Dolomites · ItalyWedding territory, plus where I started at the Vatican Museums.
• Banff · CanadaMountains big enough to make you quiet.
• London, Cambridge, Liverpool · UKFootball and libraries. A lot of walking in between.
• Paris · FranceEat slow. Walk slower.

Asked and answered