Short Summary:
Hands-on SaaS founder with 13+ years of marketing and product leadership experience. A majority of my time has been spent in the staffing and recruiting technology sphere and I believe connecting talent with opportunity is an extraordinarily important part of the global economy; especially today. Most recently I co-founded and was CMO for Herefish which was acquired by Bullhorn ATS in early 2020. My marketing philosophy centers around the people that interact with our products and create experiences that connect them with the brand to create desired business outcomes.
Relevant Experience:
Herefish (November 2014 – Present)
Herefish was the first automation platform built for the staffing and recruiting space. Firms that use Herefish see an average lift in placements from existing candidates of 76% and a reduction of 3.2 hours per day of repetitive busywork. We were acquired in early 2020 by Bullhorn where our solution has contributed 20% of net-new annual revenue.
CMO & Co-founder
Founding member responsible for creating a brand that differentiated in the space, building an engine to effectively drive leads and a product that simplified automation for a new audience.
- Designed the brand from scratch, created the logo, website, pitch decks and more to position Herefish as different in the sea of staffing tech providers.
- Grew revenue 166% in 2019; adding $1.2million in new ARR.
- Responsible for our demand generation; 42% of leads driven through SEO, 19% PPC, 33% In-person events & partnerships.
- Led UX research and design for our application.
- Created and nurtured partnerships with providers in the industry to create a network of application and system integrators.
- Post-acquisition, I educated internal product marketing teams on automation in staffing and helped produce the enablement plan for a 100+ person sales organization.
Harbinger Labs (October 2012 – December 2018)
Harbinger Labs is a small digital marketing company focused on SEO, PPC and analytics. I wanted to apply my approach to SaaS and tech-centric companies and help them overcome their marketing challenges. I sourced and managed contract employees when needed.
Founder & Operator
Started the company where I marketed and sold services to SaaS and tech-centric companies. My experience as a marketing leader helped create strategies and then execute in collaboration with our customer’s teams.
- Worked with Clearent, a credit card processing company to align and execute marketing initiatives including interviewing and evaluating candidates for their internal marketing team, simplify their core messaging buckets and personas and execute an organic and paid search plan aligned with said personas.
- Acted as a ‘digital back-end’ for Rodgers/Townsend, a DDB owned agency, and helped their customers strategically think through their digital problems. Some notable customers I worked with are Enterprise Rent-a-Ca, Spectrum Brands, AT&T and Echo360.
- Led branding efforts for Hatchbuck, which later merged with BenchmarkEmail and worked closely with their CEO to create a sustainable demand generation plan which included SEO, PPC, content, automation and UX research and execution.
Sendouts (November 2007 – July 2012)
Sendouts was a software company that built software products for the third party recruiting and staffing industry. It was acquired in 2012 by Bullhorn.
Head of Marketing (October 2009 – July 2012)
Lead the entire marketing function and part of the strategic management team. Assume every major responsibility previously held by the VP of Sales & Marketing. I’m a functional manager and work side-by-side with the team.
- Develop the yearly and quarterly marketing plans that have resulted in marketing qualified opportunity revenue of nearly $12 million and new sales revenue of $1.7 million (2011).
- Lead and maintain SEO initiatives for sendouts.com and other web properties. Organic search contributed to 30% of converted opportunities in 2011.
- Assessed and implemented Pardot marketing automation and developed the email communication framework. Email contributes to ~35% of the opportunity pipeline.
- Enacted an ‘active path’ content marketing strategy. Relevant, useful and timely content has helped boost awareness in the space. Overall web-traffic has increased 55% from 2010 to 2011 with clear connection to our content marketing strategies.
- Led buyer persona research initiatives in early 2011 resulting in 4 distinct buyer and influencer types. Used this data to craft specific messages targeting specific problems and segment on web-to-lead forms for more direct and relevant content.
Marketing Manager (November 2007 – October 2009)
Coordinated and built the lead generation activities and responsible for deliverables across all general marketing initiatives. Team lead and POC for vendors and agencies.
- Developed and implemented comprehensive SEO plan. The result was 8 core keywords ranking on the first page with 3 of the most relevant in the top 3.
- Created content and copy for use online, in articles and emails. This included ad copy for CPC and re-targeting campaigns.
- Managed the campaign tracking and metrics and made adjustments based on findings. This could include a subject line change, copy change or reduction or increase in ad spend based on performance
- Managed email segmentation and list acquisition along with sending relevant emails and content.
- Used Google Analytics and Optimizer to discover website bottlenecks and conversion inefficiencies. Tests were then performed to optimize conversion. One test in particular moved the needle from 18.47% to 27%.
- Managed a team of 3 people and implemented an agile marketing strategy to maximize impact of a smaller team.
Education:
University of Missouri (Columbia, MO)
Bachelor of Science (2004) – Management
Western State College of Colorado (Gunnison, CO)
Key skills:
Creativity, attention to detail, copywriting, storytelling, digital marketing, content marketing, user experience, design
Software:
Adobe Illustrator, XD, Photoshop, Pardot, Hubspot, Microsoft Office, Mac OSX, Salesforce (Admin), Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Moz, Google Office
Languages:
HTML, CSS, JS, PHP
Extracurricular:
Charter member of the Agile Marketing Manifesto and currently host the site along with contributing to the community