Agencies, products, platforms, and advisory relationships. The through-line across all of it: start with what the business actually needs, build the system that delivers it, and stay long enough to prove it compounds.
Founded a digital agency in 1994 that served 100+ Fortune 500 companies. Built products the market wouldn't catch up to for a decade. Worked for Jay Abraham, who taught me that every technical decision is really a commercial decision in disguise. My company was acquired in 2001. Angel investing in the mid-2000s. The 2007 crash wiped most of it out. Since 2008, exclusively strategic advisory for companies at inflection points, with client relationships spanning 5 to 16+ years and outcomes documented in the case studies on this site.
That's the resume version. What follows is the version that actually explains how I think and why it matters.
Before starting my own company, I worked for Jay Abraham, widely considered one of the most influential direct-response marketing strategists in the world. Jay's discipline was simple and relentless: start with the revenue outcome, work backward to the strategy, and never fall in love with a tactic. Every system serves a commercial purpose, or it doesn't exist.
That foundation runs through everything I've built since. When I look at a company's marketing technology stack, I don't see systems. I see revenue architecture, or the absence of it. That instinct came from Jay.
I started The Stirling Bridge Group as a boutique digital agency at a time when most companies were still debating whether they needed a website. Within a few years, it became one of the most technically sophisticated agencies in the country, serving 100+ Fortune 500 companies, many through a partnership with TMP Worldwide.
I personally built the first versions of most of our core products:
We maintained 99%+ client retention over the agency's seven-year lifespan. The products we shipped routinely arrived years before the market caught up. ZipRecruiter later reinvented our job distribution model. The closed-loop attribution approach we built in 1995 didn't become standard practice in the industry until roughly 2005.
ServiceMaster (parent of Terminix) came to us wanting a heat map. A visual representation of where their direct mail was landing. That's a simple project. But once we started looking at the data, the real opportunity became obvious: why just visualize where the mail lands when you could close the loop entirely?
What started as a heat map request became the largest deployment of PinID, the closed-loop attribution platform I had built in 1995 and already integrated into LoanLink.com, MortgageSites.com, and dozens of other sites. For Terminix, I extended it into a full direct response system that connected individual direct mail pieces to personalized web landing pages to inbound and outbound call center routing, all with individual-level attribution. Every mail piece had a unique identifier. Every website visit was traced back to the specific mail piece that triggered it. Every phone call was routed and recorded with full context. Follow-up happened via both outbound calls and targeted direct mail, all orchestrated by the system.
The industry was still arguing about whether you could measure direct mail at all. We built a system that tracked every dollar from mailbox to phone to close.
The platform became the backbone of Terminix's lead generation for over a decade. It was deployed across 200+ enterprise customers in recruiting, mortgage, and insurance. Attributed revenue exceeded $500 million.
By this point I had spent years standing in the gap between marketing teams and technology teams, translating in both directions and building the systems that connected them. There was no title for this work. I named it: Chief Technology Marketing Officer. The discipline has been practiced continuously for 27 years. The CTMO concept page explains the full framework.
In 1999, Veterinary Pet Insurance's entire eCommerce operation generated 1,355 submitted applications and approximately $330,000 in revenue. We designed and built the entire e-commerce pipeline from scratch: separate enrollment portals for visitors, policyholders, veterinarians, and breeders. Within four years: 64,210 applications annually, $16.8 million in eCommerce revenue alone (a documented 4,995% increase), and $42 million in total new business. The platform was growing so fast that VPI's own planning documents projected they'd need 2,000 employees to sustain the trajectory. VPI was eventually acquired by Nationwide Insurance. Full case study →
Stirling Bridge Group was acquired. I worked for the acquiring firm through 2003, then moved into angel investing and startup advising during the mid-2000s.
The 2007 financial crisis wiped out most of my angel portfolio. I tell people this because it matters. The companies I advise now are run by people who have also survived something. I don't work with anyone I can't be completely honest with, and that honesty is easier when you've been knocked down yourself.
Instead of retreating, I reoriented. The highest-impact place to apply decades of cross-domain expertise was not inside one company. It was across many, at the moments that mattered most.
The pivot to full-time strategic advisory. Not consulting in the traditional sense. Not hourly work. Long-term embedded relationships where I function as the CTMO for companies at inflection points: growth ceilings, pre-acquisition positioning, technology migrations, marketing-technology alignment failures.
The defining characteristic of this work is duration. The case studies below aren't drive-by engagements. They're relationships measured in years, sometimes over a decade. The results only happen because someone stays long enough to see the compounding.
A regional window and door company came to me doing $17 million annually with $160,000/month in ad spend and zero tracking. Over 16 years of continuous engagement, I built the tracking, built the CRM, built the call center software, and installed the full revenue architecture. Ad spend dropped to $60K/month. Leads rose 160%. Conversion improved 20%. Average deal size climbed $7,000. The company grew to nearly $100 million in revenue. In 2024, it was acquired by one of the largest window and door manufacturers in the country. Full case study →
A founder approached me with nothing but an idea and a question: is this a real business? I helped architect the product strategy, technical roadmap, and go-to-market approach from zero. The company secured venture funding and is currently expanding. This is CTMO advisory at the earliest stage: the structural decisions that determine whether a company scales or stalls before the first dollar of revenue.
The same pattern as 1994: build the system before the market knows it needs one. Rathvane is an enterprise intelligence company that delivers the kind of research and strategic analysis that used to require Big Three consultancies, at the speed and intimacy that only a small firm with deep AI infrastructure can provide. It's the productized version of the CTMO advisory discipline: the structural expertise packaged as a service.
Companies served directly through Stirling Bridge Group, advisory engagements, or partnership with TMP Worldwide.
The question at this level isn't "can you help me?" It's "how do I know you're real?" The answer is in the numbers, but more importantly, it's in the duration. Anyone can produce a spike. Compounding takes years. A 16-year client relationship. An eCommerce platform that went from 1,355 applications to 64,210, from $330K to $42 million in total new business, eventually acquired by Nationwide. A direct mail attribution system that generated half a billion dollars over a decade. These results don't happen from a consulting engagement. They happen when someone stays.
"I don't work with anyone I can't be completely honest with, and I don't leave until the compounding is real."
If your company is between $10M and $100M and you've hit a growth ceiling you can't explain, the conversation starts with a 10-minute application.