my background

The best work I’ve done—the work I’m known for—is identifying the truth about an organization and its brand, and revealing why it matters in a way that drives growth.

Most people who do this kind of work advise from the outside. I’ve done that—across some of the world’s most recognized brands.

But I’ve also spent 16 years inside one of the nation’s most complex institutions, building and leading the brand function, navigating the politics, the culture, and the operational reality of making strategy work when thousands of people have to believe in it.

That combination—outside perspective and inside understanding—defines how I work.

My career began in advertising, working with organizations navigating fundamental shifts in identity, technology, and market expectation: Kodak during the transition to digital. Bausch & Lomb across brands from ReNu to Ray‑Ban. DuPont’s ingredient brands—Lycra, Teflon, Antron—where the challenge was making something invisible meaningful. Citibank in student lending. Xerox as they worked to move beyond copiers. Watkins Glen International. And a regional dairy cooperative grounded in health and wholesomeness.

That led to 16 years inside the University of Rochester Medical Center, where I built and led the marketing function, developed the “Medicine of the Highest Order” brand promise, and led the evolution to UR Medicine—recognized in 2023 as a top‑five “most humanized” health system brand nationally.

My work in higher education has most often started with marketing and brand challenges—how to better differentiate a school, sharpen its narrative, or strengthen its external visibility. 

In every case, the solutions that endured required going well beyond messaging. Marketing was the entry point, but the real work depended on understanding the institution as a whole—its history, values, internal convictions, and obligations—and recognizing the strategic center already shaping how it understood itself.

When that center was identified and honored, marketing became more coherent internally and more resonant externally. When it wasn’t, no amount of execution could compensate.

Most recently, I led brand strategy inside a craft distillery navigating one of the worst category declines in 30 years—a very different scale, but the same fundamental challenge: finding what’s true and building from it.

Across all of it, the pattern is the same.

The organizations that thrive are the ones that recognize what is definitional about who they are—and commit to it.