I build creative organizations that do great work and don't fall apart when you leave the room.
Specifically: brand & creative teams and the systems behind them, the kind that keep producing great work long after the initial push. I've been doing some version of this for 25 years, and my honest take is that the creative leader's job isn't to be the most talented person in the room. It's to make the room talented.
I started as a designer. That's still how I think, craft first, then scale. Moved into creative direction at agencies where I learned what good looks like under pressure. Google, National Geographic, the Department of Defense: clients that expected a lot and got it. Won some awards. Pitched and won new business. Figured out that I liked building things as much as making things.
Then I left the agency world to join the leadership team building Copper Giants, Liberty Mutual's in-house creative agency. I came in when the department was about eight people. I helped restructure it, grew the team to sixteen, and helped set up the model that let us produce agency-quality work from inside the brand. The outcomes: $3.5M in annual savings, unaided brand awareness that grew from 17% to 30%, and a nationally recognized team that people actually wanted to work on.
Now I run brand & creative at Toast, a company that went from scrappy startup energy to a $20B+ IPO. The brand had to grow up fast without losing what made it feel like Toast. Most brands don't survive that transition intact. This one did. The brand system we built extended into the product experience itself, not just around it.
I care about the work being genuinely good. Not good-for-a-company-our-size, not good-given-the-timeline. Data sharpens that judgment. It doesn't replace it. And I believe in mentorship over micromanagement, because it's the only thing that actually scales creative quality.
