Selected work
Different decades, different categories, same job: find what the organization actually is, say it clearly, and build the system that keeps it true after I leave.
The Vermont Student Assistance Corporation is the nonprofit state agency that helps Vermonters pay for college. In 2009, Congress moved to end federally subsidized private student lending and route everything through Direct Loans. The policy was defensible. The collateral damage was not: the bill, as drafted, would have ended VSAC and every nonprofit state agency like it.
This was not a marketing problem. It was a survival problem, being decided several hundred miles away by people who had never heard of Vermont and had no particular reason to.
Built and ran the grassroots campaign — organizing the people VSAC had actually served into a constituency that Congress could not comfortably ignore. Not a lobbying push. A public one, built from Vermont outward, on the argument that a nonprofit state agency answerable to its own residents is not interchangeable with a national loan servicer.
The Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act passed with a carve-out for eligible not-for-profit servicers — a guaranteed minimum allocation of federal loan servicing volume, with the eligibility definition written to exclude anything owned by a for-profit entity or headquartered out of state. That language protects agencies precisely like VSAC.
VSAC stayed open. So did its counterparts in other states. It is still serving Vermont students today.
Advocacy is the hardest form of this work. Nobody asked to hear from you, the audience cannot be retargeted, and the result is not a conversion — it is a line in a statute or it is nothing. Fifteen years later it is still the piece of work I would point to first.
One of Northern New England’s largest commercial law firms, with the brand problem every legacy institution has: deep expertise, real distinction, and no shared language for any of it. Every partner was a stakeholder. Every stakeholder had a veto.
Repositioned the firm as an innovative regional leader and built the internal consensus to make the position stick — which in a partnership is most of the work. Ran firmwide marketing, communications, and business development with a three-person team, a $250K budget, and more than 250 concurrent projects a year. Rebuilt the workflow underneath it so the function could carry that volume without drowning.
Nonprofits, cultural institutions, hospital systems, and government bodies are the same species of client: long histories, many internal constituencies, and a deep suspicion of anything that sounds like advertising. The craft is earning the mandate, not just writing the brief.
A national direct-to-consumer outdoor brand with a two-year ecommerce redesign that was over budget, unfinished, and quietly becoming the thing nobody wanted to talk about. I was the only marketer in the building.
Took the project over, shipped it, and then built the function around it — paid acquisition, CRM, segmentation, lifecycle email, content, creative, and product marketing, end to end. Directed the outside agency partners on attribution and automated reporting, and held them to scope, schedule, and standard.
Rescuing a failing project is a different skill than starting a good one. Both jobs require you to say the true thing about where you actually are before anyone will follow you somewhere else.
Applied behavior analysis runs on behavior technicians, and the sector loses them faster than it can hire them. Every departure costs a family continuity of care for a child. This is a marketing problem that is not really a marketing problem: you cannot recruit your way out of a place people do not want to work, and you cannot pretend otherwise in the job ad.
Built the employer brand and internal communications strategy from the inside out — naming what was actually true about working there, then building recruitment marketing on top of a claim that would survive the first week. Repositioned the consumer-facing brand alongside it, amplifying it socially while holding the voice steady.
Employer brand is the honesty test of the whole discipline. If the promise is false, the audience finds out in ninety days and tells everyone.
A retail pop-up agency serving premium brands, with a demand curve that lived and died by the season and a pipeline that went quiet exactly when the planning conversations were happening.
Rebuilt the seasonal demand strategy — targeted promotions and email built around when brands actually decide, not when the agency wanted to sell — and relaunched the website to carry it.
Agencies are the hardest clients to market, because they are convinced they should already know how. Being a former agency owner is the only credential that gets you past that in the first meeting.
A publicly traded enterprise platform whose website had drifted out of step with the business it was supposed to represent, and whose event-driven pipeline had stopped converting the attention it was buying.
Led the relaunch and the digital strategy refresh underneath it — rebuilding the site around what the company actually sells and who actually buys it, and reconnecting the event motion to the pipeline it was supposed to feed.
Public companies have the least room for a vague story. Every quarter, somebody asks what you are and expects the same answer.