About

I built Band-Tees.com from scratch in the late 1990s. Press in Vogue, Esquire, Rolling Stone. Backlinks from MTV, Nine Inch Nails, radio stations. When a Google algorithm change wiped out our organic traffic, I had to learn paid search fast — competing against companies with ten times my budget. That's where my depth came from. Not a course. Not an agency job. Running a real business with real consequences.

I was pausing campaigns before attribution modeling existed, watching the numbers react in ways that didn't match the data. That taught me something that still holds: channels overlap. Last-click lies. Today's data-driven attribution is better — but it still leans toward last-click, and iOS and privacy changes have made it worse. I built my eye for this before the tools existed to explain it.

Most accounts I inherit are optimized for 30-day ROAS. That's the wrong number. Having run my own business and worked closely with others', I know the real math: ad cost against lifetime customer value. When you know each customer's repeat rate, the 30-day window stops being flattering and starts being misleading.

I've also seen what happens when you scale ads faster than the business can absorb it. It happened to Band-Tees the first time I turned Google Ads on hard. It happened recently with a client I scaled too fast. Scaling ads without scaling the operations underneath is how companies die. I've watched it from both sides.

After the Band-Tees exit in 2013, I chose to do this for other operators. I built my own feed management tool and tracking software — before Triple Whale and Hyros existed. I've worked with clients running up to $2M/month in ad spend and $10M/month in revenue. I know which levers to pull and which routes to test, and I don't blindly accept whatever Google recommends.