We went from page 13 to page 1 of Google for an important industry search term. And within six months, the new business we could attribute to organic search was enough to cover my annual salary.
My career in marketing started by accident.
I didn’t grow up dreaming about becoming a marketer.
My career started in the semiconductor industry, where I eventually found myself doing traditional marketing: trade shows, print advertising, direct mail, and all the other things companies did before we could see exactly who clicked what and whether any of it actually resulted in revenue.
And that was the part that drove me crazy.
I wanted to know what was working.
I wanted to know where our leads were coming from, what happened after someone responded to a campaign, and whether the money we were spending on marketing was actually making the company money.
Eventually, that curiosity would lead me to HubSpot. But first, I had to move from California to New York.
Finding my way to HubSpot
In New York, I found myself working as a one-person marketing department.
If you’ve ever been a one-person marketing department, you know what that means.
Everything is your job.
I was responsible for the website, email, SEO, content, social media, lead generation, reporting, and proving that all of it was actually doing something for the business.
It took a while, but in 2012, I finally discovered HubSpot and ran our website through its Marketing Grader.
We scored 23 out of 100.
Ouch.
But I was intrigued.
For the first time, I was looking at a marketing methodology built around something I’d wanted for years: creating useful content people could actually find, attracting the right people to your business, understanding what they did next, and connecting marketing activity to real business results.
So I started experimenting.
Putting inbound marketing into practice
I didn’t have a giant marketing budget.
What I did have was HubSpot, a lot of curiosity, and a willingness to learn.
I started working on our website and SEO. I created content around the questions our potential customers were actually asking. I paid attention to how people found us, what they engaged with, and what ultimately turned into business.
And it worked.
Our Marketing Grader score climbed from 23 to 85.
We went from page 13 to page 1 of Google for an important industry search term.
And within six months, the new business we could attribute to organic search was enough to cover my annual salary.
I was hooked.
Marketing finally made sense to me because I could see the connection between what I was doing and what happened next.
Turning my HubSpot obsession into a business
After 16 years in corporate and startup marketing, I decided to do something a little scary.
I left.
By then, I’d realized that the part of my job I enjoyed most was figuring out how all of these pieces fit together: marketing strategy, technology, data, automation, sales, and measurement.
I wanted to do more of that.
I started my own consulting business and became a certified HubSpot Solutions Partner in 2014.
I’ve been doing it ever since.
And somewhere along the way, what started as an obsession with inbound marketing became an obsession with all the interesting things businesses can do with HubSpot.
More than a decade as a HubSpot consultant
I’ve been using HubSpot since 2012 and have been a certified HubSpot Solutions Partner since 2014.
Over the years, I’ve worked with businesses across SaaS, telecommunications, edtech and education services, biotech, finance, retail, luxury architectural materials, and other B2B and B2C industries.
And that’s turned out to be one of the biggest advantages of doing this work for so long.
Every new client brings a different business model, sales process, data problem, or wonderfully strange request. Over the years, I’ve built up hundreds of HubSpot use cases that I can draw from when a client comes to me with a new project.
Sometimes the solution I recommend for a telecom company comes from something I learned working with a luxury retail client. Sometimes a sales problem reminds me of an automation I built for an education client.
That’s one of my favorite parts of consulting: taking everything I’ve learned from very different businesses and finding creative ways to apply it to the next one.
I’m a strategist who likes doing the work
My background is in marketing strategy, but I’m happiest when I can take an idea all the way from “Could HubSpot do this?” to actually building it.
I work hands-on with CRM architecture, workflows, automation, pipelines, integrations, reporting, data cleanup, custom properties, custom objects, and plenty of things that don’t fit neatly into a service list.
I especially love custom objects.
And messy data.
And HubSpot portals that have had so many hands in them that nobody is quite sure what anything does anymore.
Give me the puzzle.
That’s also why I don’t think about HubSpot as simply a piece of software.
When a client brings me a problem, I’m thinking about the business problem first. What are we actually trying to accomplish? Who needs this information? What happens before this step? What needs to happen afterward? Can we automate it? Can we make it easier? Can we measure it?
Then I figure out what HubSpot needs to do.
Why I keep my consulting practice small
I’ve intentionally kept my consulting practice small.
I work with no more than three ongoing clients at a time because I want my clients to work directly with me, not an account manager or junior staffer.
I’m the person on the calls, answering the emails, thinking through the strategy, and actually working inside HubSpot.
Keeping my roster small also gives me time to really learn how each client’s business works.
I want to remember why we built that workflow six months ago. I want to know what the sales team is struggling with, where the data comes from, what marketing is trying to accomplish, and what leadership needs to measure.
The feedback I hear most often from clients is that they value my responsiveness and attention to detail.
I think that’s directly connected to the way I’ve chosen to run my business.
Why my clients tend to stick around
A lot of my client relationships start with one project.
We solve it.
But while we’re working on that project, I learn more about the business. And then one of us says:
“Wait…could HubSpot also do this?”
And we’re off.
Some of my clients have worked with me for years because once I really understand a business, we keep finding new ways to make HubSpot more useful.
Maybe there’s a manual process we can automate. Maybe two systems should be talking to each other. Maybe there’s information sales needs that we could put directly on the company record. Maybe we can restructure the data so marketing can finally segment the way they’ve always wanted to.
Those are the relationships I enjoy most.
I’m not interested in configuring HubSpot in a vacuum. I want to understand what your business is trying to accomplish and then keep finding interesting ways HubSpot can help.
I still believe in the thing that started all of this
My work has expanded far beyond inbound marketing since I discovered HubSpot in 2012.
But the basic idea that hooked me hasn’t really changed.
Marketing and sales technology should help you understand what’s working. Your CRM should make it easier to run your business, not create more work. And the systems you invest in should produce something you can actually point to and say, “This made a difference.”
I’ve built my own consulting business the same way.
I’ve never bought an ad to find a consulting client. My business has grown through inbound marketing, referrals, and word of mouth.
More than a decade after becoming a HubSpot Solutions Partner, I’m still here doing what I discovered I loved all those years ago:
Learning how a business works, finding the problem, and figuring out how HubSpot can help solve it.
Want to work together?
There are a few ways we can do that.
If you have one specific HubSpot problem to solve, I offer one-off HubSpot projects starting at $500.
If you’re new to HubSpot, I offer customized HubSpot onboarding starting at $1,500.
And if you’re looking for someone who can become your ongoing HubSpot expert, my HubSpot consulting retainers start at $3,000/month.
Not sure which one you need?
That’s completely fine.
Tell me what’s going on with your HubSpot portal. We’ll start there.