How a developer ended up running marketing

I write code, I built and sold a Webflow agency, and I now run marketing across a network of agencies. Those three jobs are usually told as a sequence, one leading to the next. I would rather defend them as one perspective, because each one sees a failure the other two cannot. Developers see what a system can actually do. Founders see what an organization can actually absorb. Marketers see what a market will actually believe. Almost every expensive mistake I have watched in this industry came from a decision made with only one of those three views in the room.

I started by building websites, which is a specific kind of technical education: you learn quickly that a system is only as good as the people who have to operate it after you leave. In 2018 that work turned into Belt Creative, a Webflow design and development agency. We built for mid-market B2B companies, grew to a team of 10 and more than $1M in annual revenue, and became a Webflow Premium Partner with Enterprise distinction in 2024. In January 2025 we repositioned as a web experience agency, which was less a rebrand than an admission that the work had stopped being about pages.

What founding taught me that building did not: a technically correct answer the organization cannot execute is not an answer. I lost that argument enough times, usually to myself, to stop making it.

In October 2025 Belt Creative was acquired by Veza Digital and joined the Veza Agency Network. The process took about six months, which is long enough to learn that most of what a founder calls strategy is actually accumulated context that nobody else can read. I joined VAN as VP of Growth. Since July 2026 I have been CMO, leading marketing across Veza Digital, Shadow Digital, Belt Creative, and Hedrick, plus WAIO, VAN's AI-search methodology.

Running marketing for a company you founded is a closed loop. You are the positioning, so the positioning is never wrong, only unevenly applied. Running it across several brands you did not build removes every shortcut. You cannot be the person who remembers. Anything that is not written down in a form other people can use does not happen, or happens differently each time. Most of what I now believe came from that gap, not from a framework.

It means the work, not the oversight of the work. I am directly involved in websites, marketing systems, AI workflows, design, development, and the organizational execution that decides whether any of it ships. I am in the CMS. I am in the repository. I write the prompts and the instructions, and I am the one who finds out they were not specific enough. I also run Pyromaniac Digital, my digital marketing consultancy. The reason I keep my hands in it is not nostalgia. It is that the interesting problems in marketing right now are two layers below where most strategy conversations stop.

The thesis I am developing is that marketing is moving from a set of tools to an operating system, and that the website is the natural place for its brain. Not because websites are important, but because the website is the only artifact that has already been forced to reconcile positioning, the design system, components, content structure, and measurement. Everything else in the stack holds a partial copy that drifts. If that is right, the near-term work for any marketing leader is unglamorous: decide what is canonical, put it somewhere a machine can read, and make it the thing everything else is built from. It is an emerging thesis, and I am writing it in public partly so that it can be argued with.

I live in Florida and ride sport motorcycles, which is the only part of my week with no dependencies, no context to reconcile, and no one asking where the brand assets live.

X (opens in a new tab) is where I think out loud and post ideas before they are finished. LinkedIn (opens in a new tab) is the better channel for anything professional. Both are open.