I grew up in Texas, raised by a single dad who taught me that you show up, you work hard, and you figure it out. I paid for college myself — no student loans, no safety net — and got a BA in Marketing from Texas State University (Eat ‘em up Cats!). Knowledge has always been my safety blanket. The more I know, the more in control I feel. That's never changed.

I spent my twenties bartending and managing pubs in Austin while I finished school, then moved into the supplier side of the beer industry. Over the next fifteen years I represented more than twenty international brewery brands — Orval, Lindemans, Westmalle, Spaten, Hofbräu, Stiegl, just to name a few — as a field sales rep, digital marketer, and eventually regional sales manager and chain manager. I lived in Chicago for a chunk of that. Then we moved to Colorado about a decade ago. I managed distributor relationships across multiple states simultaneously. I learned this industry from the inside out, from the barstool to the boardroom.

The corporate world and I were never a great match. I'm not built for doing things someone else's way when I can see a better one. So in 2019 I went out on my own and founded Not Your Hobby Marketing Solutions — built specifically to help the small craft beverage brands that can't afford a full-time CMO or CSO but desperately need one.

My Mantra: "If you have customers, you have a business, not a hobby."

The brands I work with are usually the underdogs. The scrappy ones. The ones making genuinely excellent products and struggling to navigate a market that keeps getting harder — more brands, fewer distributors, shrinking retail shelf space, and consumers spending more carefully than ever. They don't need cheerleading. They need strategy, systems, and someone willing to tell them the truth.

That's what I do.

Then something unexpected happened. A hard seltzer brand came to me for consulting help. By the time we connected it was too late to save what they'd built — but the founder believed in what I was doing and asked me to stay. We scrapped everything and built from zero.

That brand became Kick Fizz — a low-dose hemp-derived THC beverage that I co-founded and help operate as COO. It's made me a significantly better consultant. There's a difference between advising from the outside and actually living the decisions you're recommending. I know what it feels like to build a brand from nothing now. I know what keeps founders up at night because it keeps me up at night too.

"There's a difference between advising from the outside and actually living the decisions you're recommending."