Professional

A long time ago, in a galaxy far away I began my professional career as a sports reporter. I Started in the print era and quickly adopted the digital side of things to the point I helped to create the first ever website for The Rocky Mountain News newspaper in 1995. I covered high school, college and professional sports teams in Denver, Boise and Detroit.

I would go on to become the online associate sports editor for The Rocky, before moving on to become an online news producer at the Detroit Free Press. 

Somewhere around 2000 I migrated to doing application development, creating apps for TRICARE Health and then several start-up companies. And then the bottom fell out around 2008 and everyone started outsourcing dev jobs to other countries. I was a developer without a project.

So I took a long hard look at my skill set, figured out what parts worked well together and then…I picked up a live game blogging gig with Sportsllustrated.com.  It was great! And at the same time I started playing on FaceBook and Twitter to pass my time.

I found the ease of using social sites and connecting with people refreshing and started exploring how that could be used in other ways than just connecting old high school friends together. I kind of fell down the rabbit hole so to speak and found myself doing what folks were calling digital and social media marketing.

I figured out how to get 20-somethings to actually look at and buy Buicks. You know Buicks, “your grandpa’s car”? Yeah, magic and mirrors of showing people what they are looking for, when they are looking for it at a price point that ties it all together.

Long path to get to a career that actually ties all of my previous jobs together with a nice bow on top. I love connecting people to the right thing at the right time…because no matter what you are selling, you are selling it to a person and connecting with that person is the key.