The gap between a marketing strategy and actual results is almost never a marketing problem. I’ve seen it from both sides of the table. Running the agency, running the business that hired one. The lesson was the same: the marketing failed because nobody understood the business well enough to make it succeed.
That’s systems thinking applied to marketing. Seeing across business domains (pricing, team dynamics, sales process, tech stack, organizational behavior) and diagnosing where growth is actually stuck. The upstream causes that look like marketing failures but aren’t. Twenty years of that cross-domain perspective is what I bring to every engagement.
I started with a psychology degree and a question about why people resist change even when the evidence is clear. Graduate work in industrial-organizational psychology and organizational development consulting at companies like Eli Lilly and Rolls Royce showed me what that resistance looks like inside complex organizations. Then fifteen years building a digital marketing agency from nothing, over a hundred clients, core relationships that lasted years. And nearly a decade building and operating a consumer business where digital marketing was the only acquisition channel. No referral network. No walk-in traffic. One channel, sustaining a business for eight years.
That combination — behavioral science, systems thinking, marketing execution, and business ownership — is what Auspicious is built on. The practice evolved into AI-native operations because that’s where modern marketing strategy lives now: strategy, content, automation, and analytics operating within AI environments. That range lets me cover ground that typically takes a team. I see the upstream problems that other marketing leaders miss: the pricing decision making a company invisible to modern search, the team dynamic undermining every initiative, the deferred conversation with leadership that’s the actual bottleneck.
Two Practice Areas
Fractional Marketing
Senior marketing leadership for companies between $2M and $50M in revenue, operating within AI-native environments. I build the strategy, run the execution, and deploy AI across content, automation, and analytics as part of how the work gets done. Every engagement starts with a diagnosis: a business-aligned assessment of why growth is stuck and what has to change. The goal is leaving organizations more capable rather than more dependent.
AI Empowerment
Marketing clients see AI in action during their engagement and want to go further across the organization. AI Empowerment is where that conversation leads. Keynotes, workshops, and engagement retainers for organizations navigating the human side of AI adoption. Most AI initiatives fail for psychological and organizational reasons, not technical ones. I work with leadership teams to surface the real barriers and build the conditions where human-AI collaboration actually succeeds. Platform-agnostic: the focus is on people and systems, not any vendor’s product.
Published Work
Book: AI Empowered: The Psychology of Extraordinary Human-AI Collaboration
A synthesis of research on why organizations struggle with AI and what leaders can do about it. For leaders who are past the hype and want to understand what’s actually going wrong.
Podcast: AI Empowered: Human X AI Readiness
Weekly episodes where the book meets the messy reality of organizations trying to make AI work. Practitioner interviews, research analysis, and the questions most people are thinking but nobody is asking out loud.
Background
B.S. Psychology, Minor in Statistics, University of Oregon
Graduate work in Industrial-Organizational Psychology, IUPUI
M.A. Marriage & Family Therapy, Christian Theological Seminary
USMC Officer Candidates School Graduate
20+ years in marketing leadership
100+ clients across industries
15-year agency founder and operator
Nearly a decade as a business owner/operator
Based in Indianapolis