Who I Am

My life story:

I was born and raised in Lynchburg, VA. Growing up, I was always super close with my family and still consider them to be my best friends. My dad has owned a direct mail marketing company since before I was born, so I was raised with the opportunity to see a business grow and learn from watching my dad. For as long as I can remember, I have been playing basketball. While I was in elementary school, my dad coached my sisters basketball team and my mom would bring me to every practice and game. I absolutely loved it!
As I got older, my brother and sister graduated high school and my dad started coaching me in basketball. Being a part of a program and leading the team as a captain prepared me for life in many ways that I had no clue of until I got out of high school. In tenth grade, I started dating this girl in my class. She had been in the same class as me since fifth grade and we had become best friends. By the time eleventh grade hit, I was certain I was going to marry her. Many of my choices after that were based on how I could make her my wife as fast as possible. I decided to go to school online so that I could work for my brother who was opening a coffee shop and that would allow me to get married while still in college. This ended up being a great decision for many reasons.
In July of 2016, I finally asked my now wife to marry me. She said yes and we set the date for November of 2017. This meant that I had a year and a half to figure out how to make a living. My brother's coffee shop opened in August of 2016 and I started working there every day. I loved it! The shop provided me the opportunity to get some real design experience and see first hand the struggles of opening a small business. There were some days that felt like the shop was on top of the world and others that we were just hoping we could hold on through. This experience proved to be invaluable as it showed me the needs of a small business and what I could do to help drive more customers and sales.
In November of 2017, I finally got to marry my high school sweetheart. We lived in an apartment over my parents garage for the first seven months or so of our marriage because we couldn't afford to be on our own yet. I continued to work for my brother and started picking up some freelance work on the side and eventually started a second job at my dad's business helping him with invoincing and paper work. This gave me insight into how a much larger corporation worked and how direct mail marketing related to what I was learning about social media and graphic design. It was crazy to see how my dad had been using the same techniques that I was being taught were cutting edge for social media on direct mail for years. This helped me realize that when it is all said and done, marketing is marketing. At the end of the day, consumers will not care what they see or how it got there unless the product or service meets a need of theirs. Both direct mail and social media rely on targeting the right audience and finding creative ways to get the customer to open the mail or click on the post.
In February of 2019, I started an e-commerce business selling Disc Golf discs. This has been the biggest learning experience of my life as it has taught me so much about design and marketing. This experience has directly affected the way I work and the expectation I place on myself when working for clients. I know how valuable every dollar is in small business and I make sure to do everything in my power to make your ROI well worth it!