YOU PROBABLY WOULDN'T GUESS MY STORY.
If you only knew me through my work,
you'd probably assume you already knew
my story.
You'd see a marketing strategist.
A business owner.
Someone who talks about clarity,
systems, and growth.
Those things are true,
but they're the result—
not the beginning.
This page isn't here to convince you
I'm qualified.
The rest of my website can do that.
This page exists for a different reason:
if we're going to build something
together,
I think it's fair that you know the
person you'll be building with.
I WAS RAISED BY
CONTRADICTIONS.
I grew up in a world where love and chaos
existed at the same table.
There were difficult choices,
broken people, and consequences
that came early.
I learned to pay attention because not paying
attention had a cost.
But that wasn't the whole story.
The same childhood that exposed me to
hardship also surrounded me with family,
loyalty, laughter, food, and people who
loved me deeply.
My family taught me respect and duty
long before anyone taught me business.
Looking back, I don't think either world
explains who I became.
It was the tension between them
that did.
RESPONSIBILITY
CAME BEFORE
IDENTITY.
Long before I knew what career I wanted,
responsibility had already found me.
As a teenager I stepped into situations
that simply needed someone to
carry weight.
At the time it never felt heroic.
It felt normal.
Years later a close friend told me
he admired the way I handled
those years.
My answer surprised even me:
I never thought of it that way.
I was simply doing what needed
to be done.
That mindset has stayed with me
ever since.
OWNERSHIP
STARTED
EARLY.
Long before Under The Tree existed,
ownership was already shaping the
way I saw the world.
Baseball was my first experience
with it.
I wasn’t just another kid on a team.
I was a pitcher, a leader, and someone
people counted on.
I trained relentlessly, competed at a
high level, and learned what it meant
to carry responsibility when the
outcome depended on you.
Everyone around me believed
baseball would be my future.
So did I.
Around that same time,
I built my first real business.
It was a cannabis business during a
very different era.
By the time I graduated high school,
I was supporting myself, buying my
own cars, managing real money, and
learning lessons about markets,
customers, logistics, and
responsibility that no classroom
could have taught me.
For a young man,
it felt like freedom.
It also carried more risk than I fully
understood at the time.
Ownership, however, isn’t only
measured by success.
It’s measured by what happens
when things don’t go your way.
Eventually I went to jail for that
business.
Years later I watched the same
industry become legal.
That experience reinforced
something I’ve carried with me
ever since:
If you’re going to claim ownership
when things go well, you have to
accept it when they don’t.
Success and consequences belong
to the same person.