I spent twenty years asking business owners how their businesses work
I published newspapers. The part people remember is the paper; the part that mattered was the conversations. To sell a business an ad that actually worked, I had to understand what they sold, who bought it, what their margin was, and what kept them up at night. A few hundred businesses, one desk at a time — hardware stores, restaurants, clinics, charter captains, contractors, motels.
That’s an unusual education, and it doesn’t transfer to a spreadsheet. It’s why I can usually name a business’s real problem in the first ten minutes, and why I’m comfortable telling someone their website isn’t the thing that’s broken.
What else have you done?
Before the coast I ran restaurants in Santa Cruz for twelve years. These days I also run marketing and visitor services for the Oregon Coast Aquarium, which means I spend my working life on the same problems I’m describing here — attendance, pricing, positioning, storytelling — at a scale where the answers have to be right.
And I photograph this coastline. Fine art prints, gallery work, commercial assignments for Travel Oregon and the Maritime Museum, about 900,000 frames of this shoreline in the archive. It’s not a side interest that ended up on the website. It’s why the beauty of this place is all over this site: it’s what I find worth getting up at four in the morning for, and I think a business’s own place deserves to be photographed that way too.
What do you actually sell?
Systems, mostly. Websites that machines can read, content that answers real questions, and workflows that hand repetitive work to software instead of people. Photography is part of it because I can do it and almost no one else in this market can.
Why should I trust a one-person shop?
You shouldn’t, automatically. Run the free report first. It’ll tell you whether I know what I’m talking about before you’ve spent anything.
Where should we start?
With the free report. It gives us both something concrete to talk about, and it costs you nothing to find out whether I’m worth a conversation.
