I never planned any of this. I was a self-taught IT guy who kept raising his hand.
That habit — volunteering for the thing nobody else wanted — is how I fell into leadership. It's how I ended up building a company in the RV and marine industry and growing it to 60% of its market. It's how F5 Networks lured me in to build their technical community, and how "raising my hand too many times" turned into running their entire corporate marketing operation: digital, search, brand, video, web, customer marketing, community — all of it.
From there it kept going. Palo Alto Networks brought me in to run customer marketing. Billion-dollar companies started poaching me as the "fix-it" guy — the person you call when the marketing is broken and the clock is running. I fixed a lot of things. I did the same for seed and Series A startups, where the budget is a whiteboard and a prayer.
And somewhere in all of it, big tech lost its shine.
Too many empty suits — or Patagonia vests, if we're being current. Too much ego, too many rooms where the person talking least about the work talked most about themselves. I got tired of it. I missed the part I actually loved: the hands-on work, the building, the direct line between an idea and a result.
So I did something about it. I moved aboard a boat and pointed the bow north. I cruised the Inside Passage, and Southeast Alaska got its hooks in me the way it does. I settled in Petersburg.
Up here, the marketing world looks different. The businesses that make this coast worth the trip — the pubs, the charter operators, the boat brokers, the folks who fix your engine before the season opens — do incredible work. But real marketing help has always been out of reach for them. Enterprise-grade strategy was something you read about, not something you could hire.
That never sat right with me, because I've spent 25 years doing exactly that work at the highest level. So I built Swell to close the gap.
Here's what makes it possible now: AI. Modern tooling and workflows do the busywork that used to require a whole team, which means I can work with a business owner directly — from a single stuck problem to their entire marketing approach — and do it for a fraction of what a corner pub could ever have afforded.
WalkTheDock, my modern cruising guide for Pacific Northwest boaters, came out of the same instinct: build something genuinely useful for this community, and put the businesses along the way in front of the people already headed their direction.
That's the whole idea. Big-league marketing, run by the person who actually does the work, for the businesses of Alaska's harbor towns.
If that's you, let's talk. No sales script — just a straight read on where marketing can move the needle for you.
← Back to the blog