Hospitality first.

Hospitality has been part of my life since I was sixteen. I started bartending at twenty one, worked through college at fine dining restaurants including Mastro's Ocean Club, and learned how hospitality businesses actually run from the inside long before I ever marketed one. That foundation shows up in everything I do now.

In 2007 I joined the preopening team of InterContinental Montelucia in Paradise Valley, Arizona as the thirteenth person hired. I started as a sales assistant and was promoted to Field Marketing Manager under the public relations department. Montelucia is one of the most well respected luxury properties in the Southwest, and being part of that opening team taught me how the highest end brands market, sell, and earn their positioning. That was traditional marketing and PR in the truest sense, and it became the foundation for everything I built after.

The unfair advantage.

In 2009 I left Montelucia and moved back to Maryland to start my own marketing company, CS Creative Suite. A year later, I took a brief role at an SEO startup in Gaithersburg, Maryland.

That role changed everything. It was drinking from the fire hose, and when SEO clicked, I had a traditional marketing and public relations background combined with the ability to actually rank a business on Google. That combination unlocked the next decade.

Hospitality clients started coming to me directly. Bed and breakfasts, spas, restaurants, all needing the dual skill set of traditional marketing and search visibility. I was ranking small businesses against much larger competitors and winning, because I understood both how the brands needed to be positioned and how to make Google understand it. That is the work I still do today, only the channels and the algorithms have evolved.

Builder and operator.

In 2013 I launched Bashelorette, the first and only digital bachelorette party planning company at the time. We raised private investment, were featured in Cosmopolitan and the Baltimore Business Journal, and were profitable within three months. I made it to the final round of Shark Tank twice for that business and competed in Entrepreneur Magazine's Entrepreneur Pitch competition in Los Angeles. Bashelorette worked because I could rank bachelorette party planning in twenty five major cities in two months, which made the B2B ad revenue model viable from day one. It was a venture ahead of its time, and looking back, the constraint was capital rather than concept.

While running Bashelorette and the agency, I was invited back to Arizona to become Marketing Manager at L'Auberge de Sedona, then promoted to Vice President of Marketing and Public Relations for IMH, the asset management company that owned L'Auberge and other hospitality and land assets. That role gave me corporate marketing leadership experience layered on top of the digital and entrepreneurial work I was already doing.

In 2018 I rebranded CS Creative Suite to Smith and 7. In 2019 I launched Chesapeake Bartenders and Events as a side hustle, and grew it to six figures within two years. That same year, I was awarded a Google paid scholarship to attend the Accelerated Mobile Pages conference in Tokyo. At the time, I was doing serious AMP testing across client sites because the speed advantage was producing measurable ranking gains, and the scholarship recognized that technical work. In 2021 I opened 1631 Venue, a micro event space on Maryland's Kent Island that was profitable in year one and books out most weekends annually. In 2026 I soft launched Maison and Moss Marketing, a niche brand serving wedding and event vendors specifically, informed directly by my operator experience inside the events industry.

Where it leads.

My digital marketing skill set is what gave me the unfair advantage to scale these businesses as quickly as I did. I never had to pay an agency five thousand dollars a month to optimize my own websites or generate my own leads. That meant the cash flow that would have gone to marketing services went into building the businesses themselves. Hiring, equipment, vendor relationships, the physical buildout of the venue, the catering license for the bartending company. Real things that compound.

Along the way, scaling my own companies forced me to learn the operational side too. Zapier, Airtable, automation architecture, internal systems, custom workflows. Not because I wanted to be a systems person, but because the businesses needed to run without me physically standing in them. That operational experience is now part of what I bring to client engagements, because most small businesses hit the same walls and need the same kind of custom solutions I built for my own.

I am also an active moderator at SEO Signals Lab, one of the largest SEO communities in the world with 78,800 members. The peer network there has connected me to some of the most talented practitioners in the industry, and I attend SEO and digital marketing masterminds with friends I have met through that group. Search is a field where the best operators are constantly testing, sharing, and learning from each other in real time. Staying inside that conversation is part of how I keep client work sharp.

That is the work. Advanced digital marketing strategy combined with the operational instincts of someone who has actually built and run profitable businesses. Not theory. Not playbooks pulled from the last agency you fired. Real strategy applied with the perspective of someone who has been on the other side of the invoice.