I never set out to build a marketing agency.

My first business started in the neighborhood.

I grew up near Gull Lake in West Michigan and started mowing lawns for neighbors when I was 14.

By the time I was 18, I had more than 20 customers and the work had expanded into retaining walls, landscaping, hardscapes, pruning, handyman work, and property maintenance.

One of the most memorable projects was helping restore the porch of W.K. Kellogg's first Michigan home.

Design gave creativity structure. Business gave it purpose.

I used the money from my first business to help put myself through my first year of college at Grace College, where I studied graphic design and business information systems.

I worked throughout school — janitorial team lead, property maintenance, and summer construction labor. One summer I worked for a general contractor building large infrastructure projects, including work at the Battle Creek National Guard base.

I loved creative work, but I was equally fascinated by how organizations operated.

Then I learned what happens when passion disappears.

After college I took a job as a WordPress developer at a local marketing agency.

I had ability, but I struggled in the environment. I became burned out, disconnected, and eventually fell into substance use.

Within a short period of time, I lost the job and hit one of the lowest points of my life.

I got clean, moved back home, and started rebuilding.

Rebuilding my life accidentally showed me what websites could really do.

A friend who was taking over his family's monument company gave me an opportunity to help with operations and work on marketing on the side.

It was an established company with generations of history, but its marketing systems had never really been modernized.

I built a simple website and SEO strategy, clarified the brand, and focused the site around the searches customers were actually making.

The company climbed search results and began outranking competitors.

That was one of the first times I saw a digital system materially change the trajectory of a real business.

I got better. Then I got restless.

I later joined a company in Grand Rapids building WordPress websites for Catholic churches.

I became good at the work and genuinely enjoyed it. But after several months, I felt the same pull I had always felt: I wanted to build more, solve more, and help more kinds of businesses.

I had already started building sites of my own and believed I could create something better.

The agency existed. That did not mean I knew how to build an agency.

I spent the next several years consuming everything I could: certifications, training, networking, mentorship, books, courses, videos, and real-world experiments.

We gained clients and built sustainable income, but the business was difficult to operate.

I was doing too much manually. I was exhausted. I was burning out.

Around the same period, my first marriage ended.

It forced another reset.

Stepping outside the agency taught me more about marketing than staying inside it.

I started selling for roofing companies and became fascinated with the connection between marketing and sales.

At one point I ran my own Facebook advertising and generated more than $250,000 in new roofing business in roughly 90 days.

I also spent time around real estate, insurance, networking organizations, and different business models.

I stopped looking at marketing as a department and started looking at the entire customer journey.

Then I discovered the missing piece: systems.

Automation software was becoming increasingly powerful, and I invested in Infusionsoft — now Keap — to teach myself CRM and marketing automation.

Then GoHighLevel appeared.

I attended some of the platform's early training and immediately saw where the industry was heading.

Instead of stitching together a dozen disconnected tools, an agency could finally connect marketing, sales, CRM, automation, communication, and reporting in one operating system.