My bio probably says all the things you expect this to cover. Rather than repeat that stuff here, I'll keep this a bit less formal. With that, here we go...
Like most of us, I'm an amalgamation of what life has thrown at me thus far. One of the most significant pieces of who I am comes from how I grew up, which was on a small farm in Northern Colorado. Farm life gives you a different perspective on work. At least I think it does. On a farm, work is life and life is work. You learn that your value on this planet is directly tied to the quality and quantity of work you get done in a day. Because of this, and for better or worse, I see my work as one of the most important things I do.
When it comes to work, I've never liked having a label or using a title. That’s mostly because I don’t want to feel limited in what someone thinks I can do because of a term or feel stuck in a silo. I want to be free to constantly try and do new things. So, as much as I can get away with it, I prefer to say that I'm a "weird hybrid of things" that make me really good at understanding and articulating the soul of a brand and then having ideas about how that brand should live in the world to make people care more about it. I’m also really good at taking seemingly disparate pieces of information and connecting them in unexpected ways to help a company re-think or re-invent their business.
My work is driven by my beliefs about marketing and brands and business and to a large degree, the role design should play in those things. When it comes to marketing, I mainly believe that a brand should only create things it knows to be useful and/or believes to be beautiful. Hopefully it’s both of those. To help make this happen, I'm constantly exploring the intersection of business, creativity, culture and technology to fill my head with bits of information waiting to be connected.
A core part of this exploration is being constantly curious about the world and people and how and why we do what we do. Because of this curiosity, I've been accused of thinking that I'm a cyborg. For the record, I don't. What I do think is that since the beginning of our existence, humans have been seeking a "magical" way to have everything while doing nothing. Technology is at a point where this feels a lot closer to reality than it ever has and we’re able to make things that make us have to engage our brains less for certain tasks/functions. If we're not careful in this regard, robots will overtake us. Ha!
Career-wise, I'm focused on working with Ned and Andy to turn MakeMatter into the kind of company we have always wanted to be a part of. Our definition of success isn’t tied to money or status, but is all about happiness and creating a place where great work can happen. We've got a lot of ideas about the way things should work between an agency and a client in the modern world and MakeMatter is going to give us a good platform for testing them. If we're lucky, we'll be able to do this for a long time. As we go, I'll do my best to share what we learn here or on a future blog at make-matter.com.
Before we started MakeMatter, I served as the director of strategy at Colle+McVoy, and a bit before that, the head of strategy at space150. At both places, I led agency teams and clients to re-frame the way they think about their brands and developing marking ideas. I did this through a strategic process that blends product design methodologies, agile software development techniques, and classic brand strategy tools. My approach to what I do still uses a lot of this thinking but continues to evolve as life brings me new experiences and nuggets of inspiration.
In between those jobs, I partnered with Emilie to create Thinkers & Makers. During that time I worked with 3M, General Mills, MillerCoors, The Lunch Box Project, and a few well-known agencies who would rather I didn't say their names or the names of the clients and projects I helped them with. Prior to all of this, I lived and worked in Denver, Colorado. Most of my work-life there was spent in account service roles, much to my chagrin. What I do appreciate from that experience is acquiring a lot of empathy for what my clients have to go through in their daily work.
Outside of work I’d say my biggest interests are food and drinks. Especially in trying new places that offer creative or expert takes on either. A very close second, third, fourth and fifth are music, modern and contemporary art, architecture and photography.
Counter to the length of this page, I actually hate talking about myself and am a very private person. That said, I think I’ll stop now before I really do say too much.
