I have spent 20+ years doing this.
I started my first business young, with a drive to make it work and a family counting on me. I built it from nothing, figured out how to find clients, keep them, and grow year over year, and ran every part of it myself for 18 years.
I was also lucky enough to have people in my corner along the way. I sought out mentors intentionally, including traveling to study under people who had built what I wanted to build, one a master of the craft, one with an MBA who understood the business side in a way I needed to learn. I am genuinely grateful for those relationships. They shaped how I think about clients, about growth, and about building something that actually lasts.
I have spent years going to conferences and seminars across marketing, business strategy, technology, and more, because I find it genuinely interesting and because staying current is part of doing the job well. That is why I hold certifications in Google Ads, Google Analytics, and AI, and why I am always paying attention to what is shifting before it becomes obvious to everyone else.
That is what I bring to Praxis. Not just 20 years of doing this, but 20 years of taking it seriously and never really feeling done learning.
I built my own business from scratch
For 18 years I owned and operated a service business serving clients across Tampa Bay and internationally, including photography work for weddings, commercial clients, and portraits. I grew it at roughly 30% year over year without an agency, without a marketing director, and without a roadmap.
Every client came from something I built myself. Every system, every referral program, every campaign. I ran the marketing, managed the sales, handled client relationships, and tracked what was producing revenue and what was not. I did not have the luxury of guessing. I had to know why something worked or it cost me money I did not have.
The channels I ran and built firsthand:
- Brand and identity: positioning, visual identity, print materials, web presence
- Client acquisition: prospecting, outreach, referral program development
- Retention and loyalty: loyalty programs, repeat client strategy, relationship management
- Social media: content creation, community building, platform management
- Email marketing: campaign sequencing, list management, newsletter production
- Photography and visual content: commercial and brand content production
- Sales: lead generation, conversion, proposal writing, contract management
Eighteen years of running your own business teaches you the difference between marketing that feels productive and marketing that actually is. I learned that difference slowly and expensively, which is exactly why I can help you skip some of it.
I have led marketing across multiple industries
After running my own business, I went in-house at organizations across different industries. Sometimes I was the only person doing marketing. Sometimes I was managing agencies and vendors. The situations were different but the work was always the same: figure out what is not working and fix it.
In the home services industry, I inherited a brand that was not reaching the clients it needed and rebuilt it from the ground up. New identity, new website, new SEO foundation, new campaigns across Google Ads, Meta, direct mail, and geofenced neighborhood targeting. Within a single season: quadrupled website traffic, 200% increase in social media traffic, 166% increase in engagement, and real revenue growth to show for it.
In a second home services role, the work shifted to business development and sales: building referral partnerships with insurance agents, adjusters, plumbers, and community partners, getting out in front of people at industry events and CE classes, and managing the CRM to make sure nothing fell through the cracks. I learned pretty quickly that in industries built on referrals, your marketing and your sales are not two separate things.
In the nonprofit sector, I directed community relations for one of the largest organizations in Pinellas County. Donor relationships, corporate partnerships, volunteer coordination, public communications. The budgets were tight and the stakes were high, and I learned how to make people care about something enough to show up, give money, and come back. That kind of communication is harder than most marketing, and it made me better at all of it.
Since launching Praxis, I have worked with founders and CEOs across a range of industries. Every engagement is different. The questions founders bring me tend to rhyme, but the businesses never do.
The full channel stack
Across all of these roles and industries, I have worked hands-on with every major marketing channel and discipline:
- Search and SEO: Google Ads, keyword strategy, organic traffic growth, search presence
- Social media: Meta campaigns, content strategy, community management, paid and organic
- Email marketing: Newsletter production, campaign sequencing, list management
- Print and direct mail: Geofenced campaigns, branded collateral, sales materials
- Brand development: Identity, positioning, messaging, logo, web, print
- CRM and analytics: Google Analytics, Salesforce, HubSpot, Tave, Zoho, Raiser's Edge, performance reporting and optimization
- Business development and sales: Referral programs, partnership cultivation, lead generation, outreach
- Content and communications: Press releases, internal documentation, stakeholder reporting, visual content
Every channel on that list is something I have run firsthand, most of them across more than one industry and more than one kind of organization.
I have been involved in the Tampa Bay business community for more than a decade, as a current member of the St. Petersburg Chamber of Commerce. I serve as a board member and secretary of the Working Women Foundation, which provides mentorship and startup grants to women entrepreneurs. I have been an ambassador for Working Women of Tampa Bay, the largest women's networking group in Florida, since 2010.
I also ran the Chicago Marathon in 2022. It has nothing to do with marketing, but it tells you something about how I work: I do not quit when things get hard.
Most people who do what I do came up through agencies or corporate marketing departments. I came up through a business I built from nothing, then spent years doing the work inside organizations that could not afford to get it wrong. I have been the founder, the solo marketing department, the person managing the agency, and the person building a sales pipeline with no budget and no team.
That is a lot of ground to have covered, and it is why I can usually spot what is actually going on with a business pretty quickly. I have seen most of the situations before and lived through fixing them.
If you want someone to tell you what you want to hear, I am probably not the right fit. If you want someone who will look at what is actually happening and give you a straight answer, that is exactly what I do.
Let's talk.
Reach out and we will be in touch within 48 hours.