About
Most marketing judgment comes from one side of the table. Mine comes from three.
Started in broadcast, where you know by morning whether anyone watched. Ran my own marketing firm for ten years, where a wrong call came out of my own pocket. Then took the marketing function inside a listed property developer, where it came out of everyone's.Each seat defined “working” differently. I've had to answer to all three.
A department budget is a courtesy. Your own money is an education.
When you own the firm you price the proposal, close it, deliver it, and carry it. If the account doesn't renew, that's rent.
That doesn't switch off when the budget becomes someone else's. I still ask what a line of spend earns before I ask what it costs, and I'll stop work that looks productive.
I've been the firm being scoped and priced, and the executive doing the scoping.
healthcare · manufacturing
nonprofit · agriculture
industrial · medical
entertainment · agency
Same question, asked three different ways.
The newsroom
Produced and wrote broadcast segments, most of them for programs about entrepreneurship and business. Attention there is earned in seconds and settled by morning, in public.
Interviewing that many business owners showed me what a marketing decision looks like to the person who also signs for it. It made starting my own firm look ordinary rather than risky, and it's still how I read a client — from the owner's side of the desk rather than the department's.
I don't wait a quarter to find out whether something landed.
My own business
Ten years running an integrated marketing firm. Fifteen-plus brands across a dozen industries, working directly with owners and C-level. I pitched and priced the work, then delivered whatever it took — campaigns, collateral, events, websites.
Most engagements changed shape by week two, because the problem in the brief was rarely the problem in the business.
Risk read from having money on the line, and having personally done every part of the work I now direct.
The executive floor
Took the function inside a listed luxury developer. For the first stretch I was the whole department — seven active developments, three of them the priority, plus the corporate brand. The portfolio grew to twelve.
Assessed every digital asset first. They were running as posters and information boards, brand presence and nothing else. They could be generating inquiries.
The content behind them came from an agency at ₱120,000 a month, producing single-digit inquiries per project. I brought content creation and promotion in-house and moved the same ₱120,000 into working media across six project pages.
Inquiries went from 18 to 498. Within 120 days a few of those closed — roughly ₱70M in property sales.
Marketing activity has to be traceable to a financial result. Otherwise it's just output.
The problem is usually not where everyone says it is.
Diagnosis is the work most people skip.
Sales says the leads are bad. Marketing says sales won't follow up. Both are describing a symptom, and the fault often sits where neither of them owns it — routing, timing, readiness, or a gap between what the marketing promises and what the product is.
So the first work on any engagement is establishing where the problem actually sits.
- BroadcastYou can be interesting and irrelevant.
- My own firmYou can be busy and losing money.
- Executive floorYou can hit every marketing number while the business stalls.
I've been each of those.
I spent years in front of a class, and it changed how I lead.
I taught marketing and digital media at college level for a few years alongside the client work. Nineteen-year-olds have no reason to be impressed by your title, so you learn to make the thinking stand on its own.
That habit came back into the work. Strategy nobody in the room can restate stays a document.
Getting a sales floor or a broker network to use what marketing builds is a teaching problem before it's a marketing one.
A few positions, and why I hold them.
- On strategy & execution
- On data & judgment
- On sustainable growth
Strategy and execution are the same job, held at the same time.
A strategy that can't be executed is a preference. An execution not calibrated to strategic intent is activity. The moment those separate is usually the moment performance becomes hard to explain.
Data is evidence, not instruction.
It tells you what happened. It doesn't tell you what to do. Organizations waiting for the data to make the decision usually move too slowly and learn too late.
Growth from campaign intensity is fragile. Growth from audience alignment is durable.
Campaigns are the surface. The audience and message logic underneath is the structure. Growth that stops when spend stops was never growth — it was borrowed performance.
Where I'd like to point all of this next.
I'm most useful where acquisition is treated as a commercial problem rather than a channel problem, and where someone senior is willing to hear that it sits somewhere other than marketing.
Leading a marketing and revenue function suits that best. Alongside it I keep a small number of advisory engagements, and I speak and run sessions where the topic is worth the room's time.
A conversation will tell you faster than any document will. I'd rather spend twenty minutes on your actual situation than send you a deck.
The newsletter
Think It Through
What I noticed, and where I’d start. Two short sections, once a month, plus a photograph from wherever I happened to be.
Reply to any of them. They come straight to me — not to a list, not to an assistant. Some of the better thinking here started as somebody’s disagreement.
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