Your Marketing Engineer
The Journey
From marketing to engineering.
From instinct to systems.
I work as a freelance ecommerce and AI marketing consultant for DTC brands. Senior marketing strategy, embedded directly into your business. No overhead, no account managers, no one-size-fits-all playbook.
The brands I work with are usually carrying more complexity than they need — in their data, their processes, their channel mix, their costs. My job is to find where the signal is buried under the noise, and build something that can go the distance.
I'm not interested in growth hacking, quick wins, or short-circuiting outcomes. What I do is closer to engineering: taking things apart carefully, understanding how they fit together, repairing what's broken, and rebuilding with precision. AI accelerates that process — but the judgment about what to build, and why, is still human. Still mine.
The Work
Senior marketing thinking.
Without the full-time overhead.
Every client relationship is personal, every engagement is considered, and I only take on work where I can genuinely move the needle. If we're not the right fit, I'll tell you.
The work I'm drawn to sits at the intersection of brand, data and commercial reality. Brands serious about DTC. Founders who know something is off but need a senior eye to name it. Teams who need AI brought in properly — not bolted on, but built into how the business actually runs.
The Mission
To create, to craft,
to change the way I work.
Complex until it's concise.
Throughout my career, back office admin and operations has evolved as information was digitised and knowledge decentralised. The trade-off has been more noise, more data to handle and more micro-communication. This has added layers of complexity, systems, processes and resources to manage. Back office admin, in my view, is a tax on creativity. I am building my own personal operating system using AI to change that.
Excellence evolves from craftsmanship.
I am going to measure this endeavour by the amount of time I get back from that admin tax — which I define as time spent navigating multiple interfaces. That is essentially my hypothesis on the human benefit of AI, if, as some have suggested, it's going to take all or part of our knowledge work.
The upside of that hypothesis is more time observing the physical world, creating detailed drawings from first-hand experience, spending time with family and friends, and connecting with customers and peers.
A path is a journey, an adventure is a direction.
My hypothesis could paint a dystopian or utopian picture for the future of my work. The honest answer is I don't know what it will bring. I don't know if I will achieve my goal, and even if I do, whether it will bear fruit or poison from the tree of knowledge we call AI.
As far as I know nobody has built their own operating system this way. I expect they will soon. For now I'm leaning in, and you can follow where it takes me on this site.
My Values
Truth Conquers
From a Pictish clan motto and my own ancestry. Not just honesty — the courage to take the difficult path, to look beyond the obvious, and to keep pursuing until you find the most accurate answer you can possibly attain.
Never Give Up
Twenty-four years as a freelancer with no guaranteed paycheck, no sick pay, no safety net. Life delivers births, deaths, house fires, recessions and everything in between. Focus on today, adapt, apply yourself fully. No regrets.
Make Yourself a Sheep and the Wolf Will Eat You
Not about assertiveness — it's about resisting the pull of the herd. Creativity demands that you challenge yourself and others to go your own way, even when the road is less travelled.
There Is No Such Thing as Can't, Only Won't
My Nan drilled this into me as a kid and it never left. Conversational bluntness that keeps it honest, with an undertone of confidence and a quiet warning against disengagement.
Pay Attention to the Small Things
The highest leverage points are at the edges of the bell curve, not the centre. The subtle cues, the out-of-place patterns, the details others miss. High ISO — more detail, less blur.
If your dashboards are blinking red,
or your growth has stalled —
that's usually where I come in.
Every engagement starts the same way: a conversation about where you are and where you want to get to. No pitch. No jargon. Just an honest read of the situation and a clear view of what's possible.