I didn't set out to become a strategist. I became one long before I knew there was a name for it.

I grew up a military kid, moving from base to base, walking into rooms full of strangers and learning to read them quickly enough to find my people before it was time to move again. Belonging was never something I could take for granted. I had to learn how to create connection, over and over again.

That instinct followed me into everything I did next.

Into Los Angeles, where I pursued a career as an independent recording artist and learned what it meant to make someone who didn't know me feel something. Into fifteen years across sales, partnerships, marketing, media, and brand strategy, working with companies like L'Oréal, MAC Cosmetics, Fandango, P&G, Fenty Beauty, Essence, and WayMaker Media.

Different industries. Different audiences. Different problems. But I kept noticing the same thing.

The best strategy usually started with a better understanding of people.

What do they care about? What are they not saying? What makes them trust you? What makes them pay attention, participate, buy, share, stay, or come back? And what are we missing because we're too busy optimizing for people to actually understand them?

Eventually, I realized that the thing I'd been doing instinctively my entire life had become the throughline of my career. I wasn't just building partnerships, campaigns, content strategies, or growth plans. I was learning how to understand the human on the other side of them, and using that understanding to make the strategy better.

That's where In The Beginning comes from.

It's my belief that understanding people, not simply optimizing for them, is one of the most underused advantages in business.

I bring fifteen years of strategy and commercial experience to the work. But I also bring something harder to put on a résumé: a lifetime of learning how to enter a room, pay attention, ask better questions, find the human truth underneath the business problem, and build from there.

Because before there is a customer, consumer, follower, employee, founder, creator, partner, or audience…

there is a person.

And that's usually where I start. In the beginning.

If that's the kind of thinking you want in your corner, let's talk.