About
Most growth problems aren’t actually marketing problems. When a business stalls, the instinct is almost always to spend more on advertising. Usually the real constraint is somewhere else — a landing page that doesn’t match intent, pricing that’s quietly uncompetitive, measurement nobody trusts, a funnel with a leak nobody’s found yet. I’ve spent most of my career finding that constraint and fixing the system underneath it, rather than just buying more traffic and hoping.
I started in digital during a period when “digital marketing” still needed the qualifier. At Toyota Motor Sales, I spent six years on interactive marketing for Toyota.com — content strategy, site architecture, and a paid search budget that eventually ran to $22 million a year. I was there through the 2009–2011 recall crisis and the “Cash for Clunkers” period, when our paid search activity got large enough that Google contacted us directly about the daily spend ceiling we were running into. It’s an old story now, but it taught me what it actually looks like to run acquisition at real scale, under real pressure.
Later I became Head of Marketing at Slemma, a data visualization SaaS platform, reporting directly to the CEO. I rebuilt the go-to-market and acquisition strategy and grew subscriptions 40% in six months — my first time owning growth for a product rather than a hundred-year-old brand, and my first time making the whole marketing function work with a small team and a real budget ceiling.
Since 2011 I’ve also been building and running my own digital businesses — Romagna Media in the US and Clearance Items Ltd in Ireland — through affiliate partnerships, content, SEO, and a mix of subscription and performance-based revenue models, at points generating low seven figures a year. Running a business myself, with full P&L accountability across two countries, is where most of what I know about growth actually got tested.
I sit on the board of Cape Clear Island Distillery, advising on branding, distribution, and commercial strategy — enough of a departure from digital marketing to keep me honest about what transfers and what doesn’t. I also went back to school for a Diploma in AI for Business at UCD (University College Dublin) and, mostly for the love of it, a Certificate in Brewing & Distilling Science at Munster Technological University. I like understanding how things are actually made.
I live on the southwest coast of Ireland and I’m happiest near the water — I volunteer with the Irish Coast Guard, which has its own lessons about paying attention to conditions and not mistaking calm water for safe water. I won’t pretend I’m not in an Irish time zone, but I’m a dual US and Irish citizen with a phone number and history on both sides of the Atlantic, so I’m fully authorized to work in the US or anywhere in the EU without sponsorship — not a relocation project, just a fact about who I am.
Right now I’m looking for a senior growth, marketing, or GTM leadership role where I can do for someone else’s business what I’ve spent fifteen years doing for my own. On the side, I’m building Balizar, a small interactive advertising agency based in Ireland. If you’re hiring for something like that, I’d like to hear about it.