Ten years of being accountable for someone else's ad budget.

Where I learned this

Three places, and each one taught a different discipline.

Non-profits

Every dollar in a non-profit budget has a donor's name attached to it somewhere. That changes how you argue for spend. You learn to explain a media plan to someone who is not a marketer and who has a genuine claim on the money, and you learn to kill your own campaigns early when they are not working, because the alternative is spending someone's donation on a hunch.

Private-equity-backed aggregators and rollups

Rollups are where paid media gets genuinely hard. You inherit a dozen accounts built by a dozen different people, on a dozen naming conventions, with conversion actions that count different things and call them the same word. Then you are asked for one number that describes the whole portfolio, by Thursday. I spent a lot of time reconciling accounts that disagreed with each other, and standardizing measurement so the consolidated number meant something.

Public property tech

Public companies report quarterly, and that pressure runs downhill into the media plan. Forecasts have to hold up. Attribution has to survive someone in finance asking how the number was produced. It is the environment that made me careful about the difference between what a platform reports and what actually happened.

What I'm certified in

Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, Apple Ads and LinkedIn Ads. I keep them current, and I will be honest with you about what they are worth: they prove I know the interface. The work is knowing which lever actually matters for your business, and most of that never shows up on an exam.

Why I work for myself

I wanted a broad client set. Working inside one company means working on one company's problem, and after a while you stop seeing which parts of your playbook were general and which parts were local to that business. Working across industries fixes that. What a rollup taught me about consolidating conversion actions across 40 locations applies directly to a non-profit trying to make sense of a donor funnel, and I would never have seen the connection from inside either one.

There is a second reason, and it is the one that matters to you. When you hire an agency, the person who shows up to the pitch is usually not the person who touches the account. When you hire me, there is only me. You get a senior person doing the work rather than reviewing it, and you can tell in the first week whether that is worth it.

How I like to work

Contract or project, by the month or by the scope. I am comfortable being the whole paid media function for a small team, or an extra pair of hands on a specific problem for a larger one. I am based in Dallas-Fort Worth and I work with clients here and anywhere else. If we are local, I am happy to sit in your office; if we are not, it has never been a problem.