I TAKE THINGS APART

I still change my own oil. I've pulled apart carburetors, rebuilt clutch plates on an old Yamaha, and replaced a wheel bearing on my truck's rear axle myself — not because I have to, but because I want to understand how a system actually operates before I trust it.

That's the same instinct that had me scaling cliffsides and hiking through two feet of snow to get the framing right on location, instead of directing a field crew from a slide deck. That discipline has carried through two decades of creative leadership that had to perform somewhere harder than a portfolio review.

It’s behind Toyota’s Keep It Wild program in Colorado, which reached an 18.8% regional share, ahead of Subaru and Jeep. It's what put a mic inside a body wash bottle at Walmart's 2008 Shareholders Meeting, and turned a heritage brand's static social page into a Reels-first content program that beat its view-rate target by 68%.

None of that means I need to be the one holding the pen. I’ve led creative teams at Campbell Ewald and Zeno, and I’ve developed ACDs, ADs, senior writers, and designers along the way.

Every so often, though, the standard still has to come from somewhere. A Vicks brief asked for something witty for the college crowd — the room reached for the obvious joke. I stayed after hours and built the ad out of real booger glue instead. It won a national Addy. Most days, that standard lives in the team I’ve built. Some days, it’s still me in the weeds.

Brands along the way: P&G, Walmart, PepsiCo, Hyatt, Anheuser-Busch, and two decades of others in between.