Independent B2B Marketing Consultant
UCLA Economics | USC MBA | Deloitte Consulting
Ran a marketing agency for 10 years
No retainer to sell
How I Got Here
I spent 20 years in corporate America. Investment banking, commercial banking, HR consulting, IT consulting, and Deloitte Consulting.
What I took from that experience was not industry expertise. It was a way of thinking. At Deloitte, I learned to diagnose the problem a business owner cannot see, and then tell them what they need to hear.
Not what they want to hear.
What they need to hear.
Then I ran a B2B marketing agency for 10 years. Sold the retainers. Delivered the reports. Built the campaigns. Made mistakes. Learned what works and what does not.
Now I am an independent marketing consultant. I help B2B companies figure out why their marketing spend is not converting to pipeline.
I Look at Marketing as a Business Problem
Most fractional CMOs in the SMB market came up through agencies. They are good at execution. They know how to run campaigns, manage channels, build funnels, and report on metrics. That is valuable work.
But execution and strategy are different things. Strategy is deciding what to do. Execution is doing it. Most marketing consultants sell execution. I sell diagnosis that allows business owners to make informed decisions about where to invest and what to change.
I have an economics degree from UCLA and an MBA from USC. I spent years at Deloitte Consulting. That background trained me to look at marketing through a P&L lens. Marketing is a line item that should connect to pipeline and revenue. Not a set of metrics like traffic, impressions, click rates, and open rates that look good in a monthly report but do not answer the question the CEO is actually asking: why is my pipeline down?
When I look at a company’s marketing, I am not asking whether the campaigns are running well. I am asking whether the marketing dollars are pointed at the right tactics. When an agency recommends 300 new pages for AI visibility, is that a better investment than fixing 6 foundational pages that increase your chances of making the shortlist?
Why I’m Focused on AI
After 10 years running an agency, I saw how AI was changing B2B buyer behavior and undermining the inbound playbook that almost every agency owner, myself included, had been running for years.
Buyers stopped searching for vendors. They started outsourcing the research to AI. Describing their problems to ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and asking for recommendations. AI became the first filter. It started deciding who gets on the shortlist and who never gets considered.
Most marketing agencies adapted by applying the old playbook to the new channel. Track AI citations. Measure AI visibility. Optimize for AI search. The industry calls this AEO, GEO, LLMO, AI SEO. Same logic as SEO, just pointed at a different platform.
That is not what I do. I do not optimize for AI visibility. I do not track citations or share of voice. I do not sell AEO or GEO services. I diagnose whether AI recommends you when a real buyer describes their situation and asks for a vendor shortlist. That is a different question, and it requires a different approach.
That is why I built the AI Shortlist Audit. It shows you exactly where your company fails when AI evaluates you against competitors, and gives you the data to make better decisions about where your marketing dollars should go.
The methodology behind it is the 3 Buyer Jobs Framework. When buyers decide they need to bring in outside help, they complete three jobs: find potential vendors, build a shortlist, and validate their final choice. Increasingly, buyers are outsourcing the finding and shortlisting to AI. That research happens where your marketing metrics will never see it. The framework explains where companies fail and why.
Why Hire Me Instead of an Agency or fCMO
Different problems need different solutions. I am not the right choice for every situation.
Hire an fCMO when you need someone to own marketing strategy and execution on an ongoing basis. Weekly leadership. Team management. Channel planning. Budget allocation. That is a different job than diagnosis.
Hire an agency when your inbound marketing is still producing quality pipeline and you need a team to scale what is working. Content production, paid media, SEO, email campaigns. Agencies are built for execution at scale. If the playbook is working, they are the right choice.
Hire me when you know something in your marketing is broken but you do not know what. When your pipeline is down and your agency’s reports do not explain why. When you need an independent diagnosis before you commit to a bigger spend. When you are about to invest in a website refresh and want to know what to fix before you spend. When you want someone who will tell you what is actually wrong, not what you want to hear.
I do not do implementation work. I do not manage campaigns. I do not have a retainer to sell. That means the diagnosis has no conflict of interest built into it. I am not looking for problems that lead to an engagement.
The AI Shortlist Audit is the product. A two-week diagnostic that shows you where your company is failing at the two invisible jobs that happen inside AI before buyers ever contact you. You hand the results to your marketing team or agency and say “do this.”
After delivery, you decide how to move forward. Use your internal team, work with your current agency, or ask me for specialist referrals based on what you need. I do not accept referral fees.
The audit is built for B2B companies where the purchase is a considered decision. Long sales cycles. Multiple stakeholders. High switching costs. SaaS with deep integrations. Professional services. Manufacturing where vendor qualification involves regulatory approval. If your buyers are comparing vendors before they ever talk to your sales team, this is designed for that process. It is not designed for B2C, e-commerce, or transactional sales.
Ready to see where you stand?
The AI Shortlist Audit shows you whether AI recommends you when buyers build vendor shortlists. Two weeks. $10,000. Three hours of your time.