Role: Co-Founder

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We’ll start easy here. Where are you from? Where do you live?

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Born and raised in Far Hills, New Jersey - or Little Montana as we like to call it. It’s definitely not the New Jersey you see on TV.

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What do you like to do in your free time?

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I spend a lot of off days fly fishing all around the world. In a way, it’s not always in my “free time” given that our clientele is well situated in the fly fishing world, but that’s why we got into this business! When I’m not on the water you can probably find me reading a book (really into 1800s shipwreck stories right now) or hanging out with friends at a bar or restaurant.

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How long have you been working & collaborating with oakpool for?

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Since the very beginning! James and I like to say we were adversaries in commerce, friends in real life before we came together on what was Ford Hamilton and has since evolved into oakpool. It’s been an amazing thing to grow and build. 

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What’s your specialty in the growth marketing world?

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At this point in our development, I’m a bit of a jack of all trades. I know the intricacies of almost every marketing platform that we use or sell, but for each of those platforms we have someone on the team who is absolutely 100% specialized. I still have access to every account we manage, so I’m a good resource for the team to bounce ideas off or talk through a solution.

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On the day to day side, I make sure that our team has every resource in order to succeed, whether that’s more staff on an account or access to new creative in a hurry. If there’s ever a fire, I’m usually the one to put it out. Thankfully that happens less and less these days.

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As we grow I’ve been able to work more “on the business” than “in the business” which has been the most exciting development of the last 12 months. I’m very excited for this next chapter for me personally.

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What does “Sustainable Growth” mean to you?

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My grandpa used to say “be careful when you scale up because you can’t scale back down again”. I think he was talking mostly about not buying a house you can’t afford or joining a country club if you’re living paycheck to paycheck, but there are a lot of principles there which I think apply to businesses in today’s world. These days, there seems to be such a bum rush to raise capital on the latest idea before any sort of concept has been proven out, which just never made sense to me. 

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Pardon the capitalism, but we’ve always been about making money and feeling good about the way we do it. There’s not a single client on our roster that doesn’t have a positive ROI on their engagement with us and that we don’t fully believe in, otherwise it just wouldn’t work. 

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It wasn’t always the case, but we’re incredibly lucky these days to be in a spot where we can choose our clientele based on if we think their product is or could be successful and where they land on our moral compass. For me, I think that’s the greatest reward yet.

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