About
I've spent 25 years learning what marketing money actually buys.
I started building companies before "content strategy" was a job title.
Audio Lunchbox was digital music before the majors believed in it. HYFN was social advertising infrastructure before the platforms had built it themselves. TONIK+ was creative technology. All three grew, all three sold.
Somewhere in there I figured out that the interesting problem isn't building the marketing. It's building the thing that makes marketing worth doing — and then being honest about whether it's working.
Today I'm CEO of North Sixth Group, a platform of marketing agencies. I founded KRMA, which has spent the better part of a decade serving one of the most demanding brands on the planet. I own West of Fairfax, a Los Angeles social and content agency built around brands people genuinely love. And I'm a co-owner and board member of a professional football club, which is the most fun and least forgiving marketing job I've ever had.
That last part matters more than it sounds. When you own a club, marketing isn't a line item. It's the whole business. You find out fast whether the story you're telling is one anybody wants to hear.
What I've built and sold
- Three advertising agencies. Built, run, exited.
- Two professional football clubs. Owned and operated.
- TONIK+, an AI-driven video intelligence platform, built before anyone called it AI.
I list those because of what they cost to learn, not because they look good in a row. Every one of them taught me where marketing money goes when nobody senior is watching. That's the work I do now: making brands and the agencies serving them get it right the first time.
So why fractional CMO work?
Because the best conversations I have aren't with clients. They're with founders and CEOs who ask me a question over dinner, get a straight answer, and say some version of: nobody has ever told me that before.
Most companies at $5M to $50M can't justify a full-time CMO and can't survive without one. They end up with a marketing manager doing a director's job, an agency doing a strategist's job, and a CEO doing all of it at midnight. I fix that arrangement.
How I work.
I'm direct. If your positioning is wrong, I'll say so on the first call. If your agency is charging you for six people and staffing two, I'll show you the math. If the honest answer is that you don't need me, that's what you'll hear — and I'll tell you who you do need.
I don't do six-month discovery. I don't produce brand platforms nobody reads. I don't confuse activity with progress.
I live in Nashville. I work in Los Angeles and New York. I'm on a plane a lot.
Thirty minutes. No deck.
Tell me what's not working. I'll tell you what I'd do about it, and whether I'm the right person to do it.