Swell puts 25 years of Fortune-league marketing to work for the small and medium businesses of Alaska's harbor towns — the pubs, brokers, charters, and crews that make the coast worth visiting.
For a corner pub or a two-boat charter outfit, serious marketing has always been out of reach — you either hired a junior freelancer or went without. Swell changes that math. It pairs senior, CMO-level experience with AI-accelerated execution, so a small operator gets the kind of marketing usually reserved for companies a hundred times their size — at a price that works dockside.
Like a good octopus, we handle a lot at once. Pick the arms you need, or hand us the whole thing — you deal with one team, not five vendors.
AI does the busywork so a senior marketer can do the thinking. That's how enterprise-quality work stays affordable for a small business.
We'd rather send a traveler a real coupon than shout an ad at them. It's why WalkTheDock runs on sponsors, not advertising.
We know Alaska's harbors, seasons, and customers — from Ketchikan to Kodiak — and we build for them first.
Steven is a self-taught technologist who kept raising his hand. He talked his way from IT into leadership, built a company in the RV and marine industry to 60% market share, then spent two decades in enterprise tech — building F5 Networks' technical community before running its corporate marketing across digital, search, brand, video, web, customer marketing, and community; leading customer marketing at Palo Alto Networks; and getting hired again and again by billion-dollar companies as the person brought in to fix what was broken. He's done the same for seed and Series A startups.
Somewhere along the way, big tech lost its shine — too many empty suits and Patagonia vests, too much ego, not enough of the hands-on work he loved. So he moved aboard a boat, cruised the Inside Passage, and fell for Southeast Alaska. He settled in Petersburg.
Swell is where he pointed all of it: 25 years of C-level marketing plus modern AI tooling, aimed squarely at the businesses of Alaska's harbor towns — the ones that have never had access to this kind of help. He works with owners directly, from a single fix to an entire marketing approach, for a fraction of what it used to cost. WalkTheDock, his modern cruising guide for Pacific Northwest boaters, is the same instinct in product form.
Tell us about your business and your slow season. We'll tell you exactly where marketing can move the needle — no jargon, no pressure.
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