Thirty years of being the person they called when something broke.

The engineering years

I graduated from California State University, Chico in 1995 with a bachelor’s in electrical and electronics engineering, a minor in mathematics and a 3.62 GPA. I was vice president of the campus IEEE chapter and a member of Eta Kappa Nu, the electrical engineering honour society.

I spent the next eight and a half years at Hewlett-Packard in Roseville, California, moving through product development engineering, program management, supplier management and strategic materials engineering. The work I am proudest of there was unglamorous: managing HP’s global printer repair suppliers and driving a three-million-dollar cost-avoidance programme by fixing how suppliers performed rather than renegotiating what they charged.

That is where the habit started. Look at the system, not the symptom. Measure the thing nobody is measuring.

Running the company

In 2004 I became Chief Operating Officer of Auctiva in Chico. Auctiva built channel management software for eBay sellers and became the number one third-party selling and buying solution on the platform, as well as one of eBay’s top affiliates — roughly twenty million dollars a year in revenue, at healthy margins.

I ran product, marketing, engineering, support and business operations through a period of fast growth, scaling past two hundred thousand users while keeping the organisation coherent. The company was ultimately acquired by Alibaba for an eight-figure sum. I was also the public face of it — interviews, training, presentations — which taught me that being able to explain the thing is part of building the thing.

Alot.com and the Google partnership

In 2006 I moved to New York as VP of Product Development at Alot.com, a major web property under MIVA Direct monetised through Google’s AdSense for Search partnership.

I conceived the Alot.com brand, led the product team, and served as the primary point of contact for Google’s search syndication partnership — worth around seventy million dollars a year. Alongside that I restored full compliance with McAfee, Symantec and TRUSTe, and directed partner integrations with Google, Orbitz, Pageflakes, NetVibes and eMusic. After I left, the brand and its assets were acquired by Inuvo.

Thirteen years on my own account

In 2008 I founded Average Idiot LLC and, for the next thirteen years, stopped advising and started owning. SEO, PPC, affiliate systems and automated content funnels. Amazon FBA and FBM businesses with real sourcing, logistics and pricing decisions. WordPress, PHP, HTML and SQL sites built and maintained by hand. Domain portfolios, hosting infrastructure, monetisation.

I built and ranked blog networks in genuinely competitive niches. Some of it worked extremely well. Some of it did not, and the difference showed up in my own bank account rather than in a slide deck.

This is the part of the CV I think matters most, and it is the part most consultants cannot offer. I know what it costs to be wrong, because I have paid it.

SEO at scale, for names you know

From 2021 I led the SEO department at Brandetize in San Diego, running search, content, social and YouTube for clients including Brian Tracy, Jack Canfield and Rule #1 Investing — categories where the competition is fierce and the personal brands are the product.

I built full customer journeys and stage-appropriate keyword and content strategies, worked with the sales team to package SEO as a combined on-site and off-site offering, and handled all technical communication with client engineering teams. Every client site finished in the best technical health it had ever been in.

Now

Since March 2026 I have been Director of Search and Strategy at Ten Golden Rules, leading search for law firm clients — SEO, local, paid, analytics and AI-driven search optimisation. Law firm marketing is a useful discipline: the money is real, the competition is sophisticated, and nobody is impressed by a traffic graph that does not turn into signed cases.

Alongside that I take a small number of consulting engagements under my own name, and keep building my own properties, because the day I stop having my own money in the game is the day my advice starts getting theoretical.

The short version