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.

PLANS CHANGE.
PRINCIPLES DON'T.

By my early twenties, both of the futures I thought I understood had changed.

Baseball was no longer an option after my injury.

Cannabis, despite its success, was no longer something I wanted to build my life around.

One path had been taken away.

The other had become too uncertain to trust as a long-term future.

For a while, school was the backup plan.

Business was still the plan.

But as I continued my education, something slowly shifted.

What began as a practical decision became a new direction.

I committed to earning a degree in physics while continuing to work, survive, and build a future for myself.

Looking back, I didn’t abandon the principles that had gotten me this far—
I carried them into a different arena.

The discipline that baseball demanded.

The ownership that business required.

The resilience that adversity taught me.

Those didn’t disappear when my plans changed.

They became the foundation for everything that came next.

UNDERSTANDING
COMES FIRST.

The biggest thing I took from my education wasn’t a degree.

It was a perspective I could apply to anything I focused on.

Physics taught me to think in relationships and energy.

Engineering taught me to test assumptions and build systems.

Years of technical work taught me how to separate signal from noise.

I stopped looking for quick answers and started looking for the information that actually changes a decision.

Two supervisors noticed that long before I did.

One admitted he was initially concerned because I didn’t jump into the work as quickly as everyone else.

I spent more time observing, asking questions, and understanding the system first.

Later, he told me that once I understood it, I no longer needed much direction.

My process had looked slower from the outside, but it produced independence.

Another manager described me as an “untapped resource.”

We weren’t even discussing work.

He had simply realized there was far more beneath the surface than he’d first assumed.

Those experiences helped me understand something about myself.

I need to interrogate a problem until I understand it well enough to make a decision I can stand behind.

That process has taught me that the quality of a decision is usually limited by the quality of your understanding.

That’s still how I work today.

Whether I’m analyzing advertising campaigns, building systems, or helping a founder make a difficult business decision,

I’m looking for the relationships other people haven’t connected yet.

One time a client believed one of her advertising campaigns was underperforming.

Once we examined the data together, the picture changed completely.

The campaign was already profitable— we just needed to connect the right metrics to see it.

That changed the conversation from “Should we stop spending?” to “Where should we invest more?”

That’s what understanding produces.

Not more information.

Confidence in decisions and actions.

UNDER THE TREE
WASN'T INVENTED.

After engineering, sales, technical work, and years of learning, something finally became obvious.

I wasn’t trying to invent a business.

I was trying to build one that reflected the person I’d already spent decades becoming.

Every chapter of my life had taught me something different—

Family taught me responsibility.

Entrepreneurship taught me ownership.

Physics & Engineering taught me perspective and precision .

Business taught me how to help people make better decisions.

Under The Tree became the place where those lessons could finally exist together.

It wasn’t a reinvention.

It was an integration.

WHAT IT'S LIKE
TO BUILD WITH ME.

Most people think they’re hiring me for marketing.

Over time, they realize they’re really hiring me to help them make better decisions.

One client had to tell me her advertising budget had been cut.

What started as a conversation about campaigns quickly became a conversation about pressure, priorities, and how to move forward.

Before we finished, she told me it simply felt good to have someone to think through those decisions with.

At the end of the day,

I’m simply trying to help in a meaningful way.

Everything else—the marketing, the strategy, the systems, the business—is just the vehicle.

I do what I say I’m going to do.

I tell the truth, even when it’s uncomfortable.

I reduce friction where I can,

create clarity where I can’t,

and try to make difficult work easier to carry.

IF WE WORK
TOGETHER.

Everything you've read here explains why I built Under The Tree the way I did.

Not around trends.

Not around an agency model.

Around the way I naturally think, work, and build relationships.

If you're looking for someone who values honesty, responsibility, thoughtful collaboration, and long-term trust as much as results,

then I think we'll probably work well together.