Aaron Douglas

I’ve spent 20+ years figuring out why marketing fails — and it’s usually not the marketing.

It’s the business decisions upstream. The pricing strategy that makes you invisible to search. The CRM that nobody uses. The team dynamics that turn good plans into shelf documents. Most marketing consultants optimize what’s in front of them. I look at why it’s broken in the first place.

My interests started with psychology and statistics — B.S. from the University of Oregon, Industrial-Organizational Psychology at IUPUI, and an M.A. in Marriage & Family Therapy from Christian Theological Seminary. I was an analyst for Institutional Research and Information Management at IU Health and worked for consultants designing organizational assessments for Eli Lilly, Rolls Royce, and FedEx. I founded and ran the organic search marketing agency Deep Ripples for 15 years, serving 100+ clients, across industries and over years. I spent a decade building a best-in-class health & wellness service from the ground up — from startup to operations.

That operator experience changed me. I’ve sat on the other side of the table, writing substantial checks to marketing vendors and deciding whether I was any better off for the investment. The short answer is “rarely”.

Auspicious is the result: direct fractional CMO leadership for growing businesses. I diagnose the real constraints, build the strategy, and execute the work myself — no junior teams, no handoff gaps. Strategy and implementation stay with one person who sees the whole system: web presence, SEO, advertising, brand, content, CRM, automation, analytics, and team capabilities.Much of my work today is AI-assisted, allowing me to deliver faster, sharper execution and deeper insights for clients. A growing area of my practice is helping leadership teams and marketing operations build AI literacy and practical adoption — turning AI from a buzzword into a real multiplier for efficiency, creativity, and competitive edge. I developed proprietary frameworks for AI readiness rooted in organizational psychology, and wrote AI Empowered to support exactly this kind of organizational change.