Notes from the growth trenches.
B2B demand generation, AI for marketers, and the occasional field report from somewhere my family dragged me on vacation. No filler, no listicles, no AI-generated fluff — except when I tell you it is. Looking for the long versions? The guides are here.
The long versions: AI search, schema, and the paid-versus-organic budget decision.
Six guides written from client work, 2,200 to 3,300 words each, with templates, copy-paste JSON-LD, and a form on each where I'll run the check on your company for free.
Browse the guides →Does ChatGPT know your company exists? A 20-minute check.
Your buyers are asking the AI engines who to call. Ten prompts, four engines, one spreadsheet: a 20-minute check to see whether you get named, why your competitor does, and the three fixes that move it.
Read the post →The missed call is the most expensive thing in your business.
You paid for the click, the page worked, the phone rang, and nobody picked up. The math on missed calls, the three-part fix, and why it should be the first automation you build.
Read the post →When to hire a fractional head of growth. And when not to.
Three vendors, nobody owns the number, and the founder is the de facto CMO. The signals you're ready, the signals you aren't, what the first ninety days should look like, and five questions to ask before you hire one.
Read the post →The 30-day metadata rewrite: the fastest SEO win most sites skip.
The pages you already have are the fastest thing to rank. The 30-day rewrite that moved a finance client 363%: pull the queries, map them to pages, rewrite in batches with AI, check every one, measure.
Read the post →Your account manager is a 26-year-old with a template.
A $30,000-a-year fee buys about four hours of senior judgment. The rest was production work, and AI just made production free. The fee didn’t move.
Read the post →Percent-of-spend is a conflict of interest.
Every dollar you save is twenty cents your agency loses. That was tolerable when the fee bought labor. AI removed the labor and the fee stayed. Plus a 90-day check you can run yourself.
Read the post →Five questions your agency hopes you never ask.
Any competent agency can answer all five in a day. The point is watching which ones take a week. Search terms, CPL by campaign, one traced lead, last week’s changes, and what they’d cut first.
Read the post →The attribution rebuild.
Apple killed open rates. AI Overviews killed clicks. Privacy regs killed cookies. Most B2B dashboards are optimized for metrics that don’t exist anymore.
Read the post →The 5% rule.
5.3% of email sends produce 41% of email revenue. The other 94.7% — your weekly newsletter, the campaign you spent three days perfecting — is a rounding error.
Read the post →Speed to lead.
Respond to an inbound lead in 5 minutes, get a 51% follow-up open rate. Wait 24 hours, get 12%. Most B2B teams know this number and still wait.
Read the post →The 70/20/10 collapse.
Marketing budgets shrunk from 11% of revenue to 7.7% in three years. The teams winning aren't spending more — they're allocating differently.
Read the post →The 83 / 55 gap.
83% of growing SMBs use AI. 55% of declining ones do. The gap is bigger than any productivity stat — and most owners are on the wrong side without realizing.
Read the post →Marketing as a revenue function.
If your CMO can't quote pipeline contribution by channel from memory, you don't have a marketing function — you have an activity function. The shift to RevOps in 2026.
Read the post →The click collapse.
For every 100 clicks your #1 ranked page used to earn, Google now keeps 58. That's not a blip — it's a permanent structural change.
Read the post →Advantage+ ate your Meta strategy.
Meta's algorithm now runs your campaigns better than you can. That's the good news. Here's what still matters — and the five inputs that decide whether Advantage+ prints money or burns it.
Read the post →From MQLs to AQLs.
94% of B2B buyers pick a vendor before they ever talk to sales. AI agents are replacing MQLs with Agent-Qualified Leads. Here's what that breaks, what it fixes, and how to prepare.
Read the post →Fourteen Inc. 5000 placements. One pattern.
After 14 Inc. 5000 wins across different clients and industries, one pattern stood out. It wasn't a channel. It wasn't a tactic.
Read the post →AI visibility is the new SEO.
Your customers aren't Googling anymore. They're asking Claude, ChatGPT, and Perplexity. Here's what SMBs need to do before the window closes.
Read the post →The PMax problem.
Performance Max is the fastest way to waste $50k on Google Ads. Google will tell you the opposite. Here's why both can be true — and the 5 guardrails every account needs.
Read the post →From family vacation planning to B2B lead gen.
The principles of planning a perfect family vacation and engineering a high-performing B2B marketing funnel are remarkably similar — here's the overlap.
Read the post →Ultimate guide to an Aruba family vacation.
Flights, accommodations, excursions, beaches, and the one restaurant you can't skip. My full playbook after nine trips.
Read the post →DevReady makes Inc 5000 — two years running.
Back-to-back on the Inc 5000, plus Inc Regionals and Colorado Companies to Watch. A quick note on what it took.
Read the post →Best ways to experience Aruba with families.
The tighter, shareable version of my Aruba playbook. Activities, restaurants, hidden beaches — ranked.
Read the post →Outsourcing B2B lead generation.
When outsourcing B2B outreach beats hiring full-time. Cost, scalability, and the six things to look for in a partner.
Read the post →Like what you're reading?
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Most of what I write about is stuff I'm actively working on with clients. If any of it hits close to home, get in touch.
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