I spend most of my time thinking about how businesses actually grow. Not the stories we tell about growth, but the underlying mechanics. What the research says. What the data shows. What operators discover when they look past the narratives.
My background is in building and operating digital systems, particularly in local service businesses where the feedback loops are tight and the stakes are immediate. When someone searches for a plumber and your phone does not ring, you learn quickly what matters and what does not.
This work led me to marketing science, the empirical research tradition pioneered by the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute and others. What they have discovered, through decades of rigorous study across hundreds of categories and dozens of countries, challenges most of what the marketing industry believes about how brands grow.
The Operator Path
Before Max Digital Edge and Stok Tap, I spent 7 years in electrical ecommerce building EnergyAvenue.com.
We grew that business from a local distributor into a national ecommerce player, eventually being acquired by one of the largest electrical supplies distributors in the world. Along the way, I sold tens of millions of dollars in products online and managed millions in Google Ads spend across an inventory of 40,000+ SKUs.
This experience was my laboratory. It taught me that at scale, manual optimization fails. You cannot manually bid on 40,000 SKUs. You cannot manually follow up with 10,000 leads. You need systems. And you need to understand the science of how buyers actually behave, because intuition is often wrong.
What I Think About
Most of my thinking centers on a few interconnected problems:
Demand capture vs. demand creation. Most businesses dramatically underinvest in capturing existing demand while overinvesting in attempting to create new demand. The math rarely works. I have written about this extensively.
Systems over heroics. Great operators build infrastructure that handles the predictable so humans can focus on the exceptional. This is not about replacing people. It is about scaling judgment through well-designed systems.
Mental availability. The marketing science concept that explains more about buyer behavior than perhaps any other. Being the brand that comes to mind when the buying situation arises. Simple to state, difficult to build.
The Work
The ideas on this site inform the operational work at Max Digital Edge, where we build demand capture systems for service businesses. Google Ads infrastructure. AI-powered follow-up systems. The unglamorous machinery that converts search intent into revenue.
I do not consult. I build and operate. The thinking here is a byproduct of doing, refined through years of learning what actually moves the numbers.
How I Work
I write to think clearly. Most of the essays on this site started as attempts to work through a problem I was facing. Writing forces precision. It exposes the gaps in your reasoning. It makes vague intuitions concrete enough to test.
I read research, not marketing blogs. The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, the IPA Effectiveness Awards database, the academic literature on buyer behavior and brand growth. Primary sources over summaries. Data over opinions.
I prefer small teams and tight feedback loops. The faster you learn whether something works, the faster you can adjust. This bias shapes everything from how I structure projects to how I think about follow-up infrastructure.
What This Site Is
This is an operator journal. A place to develop and share ideas. A long-term project in building authority through thinking, not through selling.
If you find the ideas here useful, that is the point. If they lead you to working together, that is a bonus. But the primary purpose is the thinking itself.
You can see what I am focused on right now, explore my operating principles, or start with the essays.