I grew up in a military family. My dad was a general. I graduated from Virginia Military Institute, then served as a U.S. Army field artillery officer overseas for 3 years.

After I got out of the army, I earned an MBA and decided to work in advertising. So I put together an ad for myself and got a job at one of the oldest, largest ad agencies in New York, J. Walter Thompson.

I stayed in New York for a decade, later working at Grey Advertising, the largest agency in New York at the time. In New York I met my wife, we got married and our first child was born which prompted us to move out of the city, in our case to Virginia. I worked at a regional ad agency for a few years and then opened my own advertising shop in 2001.

Along the way, I began to notice that the dominance of advertising was quickly fading away. And that was making me feel increasingly irrelevant. So I started reading a lot more marketing and sales books. And I stumbled on an early edition of David Meerman Scott’s The New Rules of Marketing & PR, understood where marketing was going and I felt like I had been granted a second bite at the career apple. But I also vowed to myself not to get caught flat-footed by not keeping up with all the changes going on in modern marketing.

I pivoted my agency from traditional advertising to digital marketing and started The Marketing Book Podcast where each week I publish an interview with the author of a new marketing or sales book. The podcast now has millions of downloads, listeners in over 160 countries, and has received accolades from organizations like LinkedIn and Forbes. As of 2023, I’ve published over 400 interviews and I’ve read every book featured on the show.