My Authentic Story

I help people and organizations unearth, frame, and tell their authentic story. Fortune 500 executives. Startup executives looking to connect their story with their company's story. Successful entrepreneurs transitioning to a life of purpose post work. And amazing individuals with unique stories they never had the time, space, or confidence to tell.

Stories are the most powerful way to communicate. There's a tremendous amount of research about what happens to us when we hear a story: different areas of the brain, beyond language processing, light up. We feel the emotion of the storyteller as our brain waves synchronize with them. We are transported to the locations and scenes they share, connecting with their past experiences or future vision. We immerse ourselves in new perspectives and points of view. When we hear stories, we connect to the narrative and the information being communicated with greater salience. When we hear stories, we feel them, we synchronize with them, we're transported by them, and thus, we remember them.

So, how much time do you spend on your story? 

One of the biggest challenges people have with telling their own story is having an audience to practice with. Someone whose job, whose sincere personal passion is to hear your story for no other reason than to help you unearth it, frame it, and then, turn around and share it more broadly. That's the role I play alongside you.

The difference between a story and your authentic story is how connected you feel to it. How natural it feels to you. And as a result, how passionate, and convincing you are when you tell it. The end result? You hit all the notes with the audience so your authentic storytelling experience becomes a powerful story consuming experience for them.

If you have a narrative destination in mind, we’ll build a bridge to help you get there. If you have a complex set of experiences you’re trying to navigate and make sense of, we’ll find the laces to help you pull them together.

Building Bridges. Tying Laces. Telling Your Authentic Story.

Rutgers University

Designed, developed and launched a class at Rutgers titled "Find and Evolve your Purpose" currently in the School of Human Resources Management. It's a 3 credit course where we equip students with the space, tools and framework to arrive at a sense of purpose by working through a deeper understanding of themselves -- their strengths, values, goals, and dreams. We start by emphasizing the importance of happiness (well defined, not abstractly considered) and spend an exceptional amount of time on where they tend to get stuck, so we can help them understand how to "unstick" themselves when those moments arise. The feedback has been exceptional and I continue to innovate and iterate after every class based on feedback and engagement.

The course was inspired by my work as a coach and as a manager. Hearing people struggle with identity, purpose and the value they bring as they approached their 40s and 50s made me wonder if we weren't having these conversations early enough. How much happiness, how much value, how much impact were we losing as people stumbled through their journey as opposed to walked more deliberately through it?

Here's what students are saying:

"I’d just like to say how much my mind is put more and more at ease after every class. I used to have such a linear perspective on success and was paralyzed by the fear of failure. I did everything perfectly, took no risks. I truly mean this, hearing all these speakers has given me the courage to at least open up my mind to taking risks and I am now teaching myself skills to hopefully break into another career field that I really want. I’ve redefined what success looks like for me because I’ve realized that success doesn’t have to look the same for everyone. I have no idea where I am going to end up career-wise, but for the first time in my life that doesn’t horrify me; all I’m doing now is trying my best, truly listening to myself and my desires, and going with the flow."

Lecturer and Adjunct Professor of Purpose

Anaiya and Jaan

Early in 2014, my wife and I had a daughter. In May of 2016, our family expanded to include a son. They are works of art. Acts of magic. What I realized is that though LinkedIn captures my experience in one context, it ignores the context of my experience. Which is why I felt it necessary to add them to my profile. 

They are the context for everything I do, and the way I approach everything in front of me.

Co-Founder/Dad

Dream Village, Where Kids Build Better Tomorrows

Dream Village is where kids go to build better tomorrows.

We use picture books and the web to help kids explore and address important global issues. At Dream Village, kids Learn about social and environmental issues through our picture books, Vote for where we donate our profits ($5 from each book to start), and feel equipped to Do something to generate awareness and make a difference for the people, causes and organizations who inspired them.

Saved by the Well on Amazon: http://amzn.to/2AqxQWM

Just Shoes on Amazon: http://amzn.to/2ApQv4V

Today's the Day on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Todays-Day-Dream-Village-Story/dp/1719473633

Remember the First Time (in Development)

We are a for profit social enterprise dedicated to elevating the work of amazing, extraordinary, existing nonprofit organizations. Our goal is to serve as a new and incremental way for nonprofit organizations to generate awareness of their work and passionate followers for their cause.

Founder

SaaSWorks

SaaSWorks helps recurring revenue businesses grow, by ensuring your sales and revenue data is ironclad so you can understand what drives your performance (and what doesn’t), ultimately focusing and nudging your team to do the work that matters most.

If that sounds impossible for a pure software company to do, it is. Which is why SaaSWorks is more than "just software". We’re a purpose-built continuous analytics platform, monitoring behaviors and generating actionable insights that are validated and presented to you by experts, in a form that’s easy for your team to action.

SaaSWorks is tailored to businesses focused on maximizing customer lifetime value and accelerating productive and efficient growth.

Customer, Corporate and Revenue Strategy

Boldr

Working as a Board Member and Advisor to the pre-eminent conscious, mission-driven outsourcing company on the market, and serve an excellent team and a strong network of clients who prioritize people, partnership, outcomes, and impact over short-term transaction costs alone.

Board Member, Executive Advisor, Strategic Consultant

Boldr is a purpose-driven outsourcing company that helps companies rethink what can be outsourced (moving from tasks to building high performing global teams) and what outsourcing can be (a force for good in careers and in the communities where people live and work).

In my 5 years at Boldr, my role expanded from Advisor, to Executive Consultant, to Board Chair, and finally, to President. Responsibilities included all things Commercial (Customer Success, Marketing, Sales, Account Management, Talent Acquisition, Service Delivery, Implementations, and Business Intelligence) culminating in building & leading a team of over 1000 Team Members (~90% of the company).

In my 2.5 years leading commercial efforts, Boldr:
• 8.3x Company Valuation
• 5x Team Size (200 > 1000)
• 4.5x Revenue (including recovery from a 35% revenue loss in Mar '20)
• 2022 on a 2x Run Rate (ahead of plan for Q2 by the end of Feb)
• Expanded to 5 locations (2 = Philippines, 1 = South Africa, Mexico, Canada)
• Grew while remaining bootstrapped and improving margins
• Fostered a culture of support, inclusion, collaboration, ownership and accountability

I am most proud of the strides we made converting our purpose and values from marketing sound bites to guiding principles governing how we operated and elevated the industry. From making PTO a management KPI, to helping Team Members draw a straight line from their work to the impact they made holistically (in their careers, on the company and with our clients, and in the communities where we live and work).

We proved that growth and success in today's environment starts with how you attract, support, equip and unleash the incredible talent and potential of your people. Employee success drives all other successes.

I stepped back and resigned in Jan '22 with the company in great shape: a strong $$$ pipeline, leadership team, infrastructure, operating principles, and updated market presence. I am rooting for Boldr while being excited for what's next.

President, Chief Commercial Officer, Board Chair

Crazy Egg

GM at Crazy Egg. We did a lot of great things, but also, from my role, I could not do more or enough. As a result, I was let go in September 2019 along with a large portion of the non-technical team.

Why? The company and the product needed to be rebuilt from the ground up. No amount of marketing and revenue generation ideas were going to compensate for that need, and it took us about 15 months to realize that with conviction. The company is back in their original founding team’s great hands for what follows. I learned a tremendous amount about when to let go, in this role. You can only iterate, test, experiment, so much. 

The environment within which we operate and the product and technology atop which we were asked to scale a business, still provided some incredible opportunities to prove value and impact commercially. Here's some of what we did and achieved:

Stabilized and started to inflect growth curve (my last four months featured our best month in 4+ years and a final month with 20% y-o-y growth.)

Increased Trials (with credit card required) 80%.

Recovered and increased overall traffic (blog, qualified visitors) 250%.

Fought off increasing churn due to inherited price increases by increasing trial engagement 300%.

Transitioned from a majority outsourced and contracted team to a majority in-house team and build the foundation of a company and culture.

Rebuilt and dramatically improved brand, CSAT, and general sentiment (frequency of positive engagement as well as depth of quality engagement) internally and as featured on public review sites (G2, Capterra).

Built from the ground up infrastructure and reporting that gave us daily visibility into performance and revenue, shifting from an inability to forecast and predict beyond actual daily cash flow after the fact to forward looking scenarios on a monthly basis.

Created celebrated partnerships and integrations with incredible companies like Shopify, SurveyMonkey, and Segment.

Help Scout

The job of a leader joining an organization that has experienced Help Scout's level of success is to help the company set itself up for the next stage of growth. The investment requires (1) developing roles, infrastructure, and processes that put our best people in position to thrive, and (2) ensuring our company is in position to thrive when our best people choose to move on. 

We've successfully elevated or hired talented people to take ownership of metrics that align to specific, critical steps in a customer's experience with Help Scout. In some cases, we've seen transformational growth (new customer acquisition, product adoption and engagement, unique visitor traffic, cash flow and annual payments). In some cases we've dug deep, dispelled myths about what was and was not working, and developed strategies to move the company forward (unique visitors, customer expansion). And in other cases still, we've built altogether new models for generating revenue that fit with our values as a business and the unit economics of our business (support-driven growth, sales). There's more to be done and we have the right people in place to do it.

I am proud of the work we've done thus far at Help Scout and am excited about what we are poised to achieve going forward across the following teams and aspects of the customer experience:
> Content
> Public Relations
> Demand Generation
> Sales Development
> Inside Sales
> Trial Engagement
> Customer Onboarding
> Customer Success
> Customer Support
> Product Marketing
> Business Intelligence/Data Science. 

I'm honored and humbled by my time with this team and with this organization. I've developed an unrelenting passion for the value of Customer Service as an integral pillar of the customer experience, and as the point of differentiation for the best companies over the next 3-5 years.

Chief Growth Officer (Raised $6.2mm)

LiveIntent, Inc.

Ran Marketing at LiveIntent. Collaborated with an exceptional team of people who:
> Developed a press and corporate communications strategy that moved LiveIntent from rarely covered and discussed (if only via paid opportunities) to coverage as a thought leader, one of the fastest growing companies in NYC (Crain's), one of the most admired companies in America (Forbes), and one of the best places to work (INC.) 
> Transformed LiveIntent's approach to content marketing, brand communication, and demand generation in a crowded market. Getting creative with video, podcasts, webinars, and blog posts to drive customer awareness and engagement. Resulted in Marketing contributing directly to 90% of revenue generated by Sales Development.
> Developed a robust Product Marketing approach (in the absence of new products in market for my entire two years at the company) that built everything from certification programs, to self-service tools (knowledge base, walk.me), to rich collateral and case studies, to a full and transformational system used to track every piece of content that was sent by marketing or sales, and opened by individual customers and prospects anywhere in the sales cycle. Content shares grew from the few hundreds to the thousands.
> Seen as a best practice marketing team by all vendors, with Marketo and ClearSlide reaching out fo prominently feature LiveIntent's Marketing team as a model for Marketing Automation and Marketing Attribution.
> Partnered with CEO and CFO to drive our Series D fundraise ($32.5mm) with a new lead investor.

Ran the Revenue side of the business for 6 months. Increased run rate by 7.5% with tight constraints, reduction in head count, and little time to impact sales cycles. Pulled together what was a fractured and contentious set of teams across the customer experience into a more collaborative and unified team across revenue.

Had an amazing boss. Had an amazing team. Think the world of all the individuals that work at the company.

Chief Marketing Officer (Raised $32.5mm)

Chartbeat

Developed a holistic approach to Marketing from scratch, creating a servant function and discipline that supported and enabled every part of the business. 

Some highlights? 

Revenue: In my first month, Chartbeat was in the midst of its most challenging revenue cycle. Over the course of 2013 we took the company from back-to-back months of poor performance (with minimal pipeline behind it) to drive 50% overall growth for the year while building a strategy, a plan, and implementing the tactics necessary to set the stage for 100% growth y-o-y in 2014. Stepped in as interim VP of Sales for 1/3 of 2013.

Product: Transformed the company's approach to Product Marketing after a series of false starts and missteps around product releases; resulting in one of the most successful Product Marketing efforts I have been a part of to date (transitioning clients from v1.0 of our platform to v2.0) and building a framework for future Product Marketing efforts in 2014. 

Strategy: Eschewed prior market sizings that were conducted and built a bottoms-up model for all products using our data, our pricing, and our roadmap. Resulted in a practical, holistic understanding of the market opportunity (for the first time, tangible) and driving plans for the future of the company, ranging from product roadmaps to Board conversations to financing (interim and long-term solutions.)

Customer: Connected disparate functions across the organization and built/established new roles to ensure a comprehensive and cohesive customer experience, across all customer sizes and stages in the lifecycle. Developed models to do everything from understand and predict new customer revenue (from a culture devoid of forecasting to one setting stretch goals and arriving within 1.5% of targets) to insulating against churn (a scoring model based on usage, behavior, and relationship quality.)

VP of Marketing (Raised $3mm)

“Humility is the noble choice to forgo your status and use your influence for the good of others. It is to hold your power in service of others.”

-John Dickson

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances".

-Viktor Frankl

“Demons wilt at genuine self-confidence.”

-Bob Odenkirk 

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