TWO PIECES

OF TIN FOIL

AND A

RUBBER BAND.

Presales from absolute zero.

When Vericast launched NXTDRIVE, there was no presales infrastructure — no demo environment, no solutioning playbook, no ROI story. Built all of it. Defined the narrative, built the demo, developed the competitive intel, worked the deals. Within two years: seven clients signed. $8M+ in combined platform and media revenue.

The best stories work without you.

Built two modular presales narratives — one around customer analytics for a value retailer, one around register capture conversion for a catalog brand. A seller took both into a third account, ripped them apart, and stitched them back together onsite. It held. Good thing we built on solid ground.

The only person who could pitch both sides.

Redpoint Global had two complementary platforms — a data pipeline and identity resolution engine, and a campaign orchestration and real-time decisioning platform. I was the only presales resource who could pitch both independently and as an integrated CDP solution. CVS, Gap, GoDaddy, Ralph Lauren. The dual-platform fluency was the differentiator.

The campaign that drives itself.

Most marketing automation stops at scheduling. Set the audience, set the budget, set the cadence, launch. What happens next is manual — someone watches the numbers and adjusts.

I kept thinking about GPS. You enter a destination. The system knows the route. But when there's traffic, it doesn't ask you what to do. It reroutes. In real time. Based on conditions you couldn't have anticipated when you left. That's what campaign orchestration should look like — a brand sets goals and budget, the system knows the audience, the channels, the offers. When something isn't working, it doesn't wait for a human to notice. It reroutes.

I wrote it down in 2021. Called it the Marketing GPS. It didn't make the product roadmap. The industry caught up. They're calling it agentic marketing now.

Sometimes you're hired to say the thing nobody will say.

The CEO didn't hire me to sell a CDP. He hired me because nobody inside would tell him the truth about it. I confirmed it wasn't working within weeks and said so directly — to the team, to the product org, all the way to the CTO. That was the job.

Spent two years building anyway — cross-training sellers, feeding the product team, writing the vision document that became the foundation for what came next. When the project was pulled and rebuilt I left. It was the right call. They said they'd fixed it. I went back. The underlying problems had been reproduced in the new platform. Different name, same ceiling.

The first time I had nothing to lose by telling the truth. The second time I did. That's the difference.

The platform needed proof it was working.

NXTDRIVE's client-facing UI had gone internal-only. No visibility for customers. No evidence the platform was adding value — even when it was. Development was off the rails and the roadmap wasn't going to fix it.

So we designed around it. Give customers a window into their own results: counts, customer growth, sales lift, onboarded data, variance, segmentation shifts, campaign activity, channel performance. Worked directly with the UX team to define requirements, design the flows, prototype it, and hand a finished spec to a third-party build team. It launched at the end of 2025 as the client-facing layer of the Iridio platform.

The failing project nobody wanted.

A high-visibility Epsilon project had gone off the rails — timeline blown, client relationship strained, team demoralized. I transitioned onto it, re-established momentum, reset expectations, and led it through delivery. Not glamorous work. But the kind of thing that gets you promoted to Senior Director when you pull it off.

80 databases. One file. Zero duplicates.

The Multiple Sclerosis Society had 80 regional chapter databases with no unified donor record. Led a 12-person team through a year-long consolidation — multi-stage matching logic, full ledger reconciliation, normalization rules built from scratch. One of the first large-scale identity resolution projects in the nonprofit sector, before any commercial tooling existed for it.

Building the rules before the rules existed.

AirTouch Cellular had 100,000+ business account records with no standardization — subsidiaries, parent companies, hierarchies all scrambled. Built the matching logic, normalization rules, and subsidiary-to-headquarters frameworks from scratch. No commercial B2B entity resolution solution existed yet. We invented the methodology on the job.

Billions of call records. Daily.

Pacific Bell had one of the largest customer databases in US telecom. Designed and managed the mainframe data ingestion pipelines that processed billions of call records every day. Scale problems most people in martech today have never had to think about — and that informed everything I've done with data architecture since.