Exactly one year ago this week, I was sitting behind the wheel of a truck loaded with all our family’s possessions, three kids and our pets, watching the temperature gauge tick dangerously close to redlining in the middle of a brutal summer heatwave. We were in the middle of a multi-day cross-country haul from Los Angeles to our new home in Waxhaw, North Carolina.
It was the culmination of a five-year search for a new chapter, preceded by months of back-and-forth travel, getting property settled and trying to manage a business while living out of suitcases.
Looking back, that overheating engine was a pretty accurate metaphor for how I used to run my business.
For years, I operated under a specific, high-friction model. When you start an agency, you fall into the trap of thinking you have to be the star player—the loudest voice in the room, the most informed person at the table and the ultimate fixer for every client fire. You build the entire operation around your personal capacity to execute.
It works fine when you are small. Your capacity is the ceiling, and when you’re four people deep, that ceiling is high enough that nobody notices it. But eventually, the heat catches up to you.
We actually tried to expand our agency’s footprint outside California several years ago, but it failed. I pulled the plug because I realized the business simply wasn’t built to survive it. The systems weren’t there, the management layer was too thin and everything was still tethered back to me. So we went back to the drafting board. We spent years restructuring operations, building departmental leadership and redesigning workflows so a distributed workforce across eight states could flourish, not just survive.
Moving to North Carolina last year was the ultimate stress test for that new architecture.
Getting settled in the South has been a welcome change of pace. People are kind, things are clean and there’s a calm that’s hard to find in Southern California. My kids have had their share of ups and downs adjusting to a totally new environment, but watching them navigate those challenges has made me incredibly proud. Short-term friction builds long-term resilience, and that is a skill I am glad they are developing early.
None of this would have worked without my wife, Sheridan, my partner in life and in the business. Beyond being incredibly supportive through the chaos of the move, she brought perspective I didn’t have on my own. My hobbies tend to involve cars, fishing or weapons. Hers is gardening, as she loves growing things. When we got here, she quickly realized she didn’t know the first thing about gardening in the South, so she went back to school and relearned the whole craft from scratch. A year later, most of the food on our table comes from our little homestead. That sent a pretty clear message to the kids, and to me, about the danger of sitting on your laurels.
On the business side, the last 12 months have been an intensive lesson in adaptation. We’ve established a physical footprint here in Charlotte, brought on exceptional local talent and kept our team in LA and across the country in sync.
It also forced a massive mindset shift in how I view my own role.
Maybe it’s entering middle age, maybe it’s the perspective that comes with uprooting your life or maybe it’s just time, but I no longer view myself as the star player on the field. In fact, I don’t even view myself as one of the players anymore.
My job today is to be the general manager. In the modern agency landscape, the “star player” model of leadership is dead. The pace of work has accelerated dramatically. Between AI, automated workflows, Zoom fatigue and an endless stream of communication tools, teams are working faster and harder than ever before while facing more distractions than at any time in human history.
If you are trying to micro-manage that environment as a founder, you will burn out, and your business will stall.
As a GM, my job isn’t to draw up every play. It’s to build the roster, retain the star veterans who’ve been with us through thick and thin, and constantly hunt for new talent, whether that means bringing established players over from other teams or spotting someone in the minors and giving them their first big break.
Building that roster means leaning into emotional intelligence over authority. High EQ in leadership isn’t about soft-soaping hard truths; it’s about reading the room, understanding what motivates individual people and knowing when a team member needs air cover versus a push. When you aren’t on the field running every route yourself, your empathy and intuition become your primary sensors. You have to hear what isn’t being said on a status call, catch burnout before it hits a project and build a culture where people feel safe flagging problems early rather than covering them up. The most expensive problems I’ve ever dealt with weren’t the ones my team caused—they were the ones they were too afraid to tell me about.
Equally critical is building airtight standard operating procedures. In a remote or hybrid environment, culture without structure quickly devolves into chaos, and you cannot expect junior hires or distributed teams to thrive on ambiguity. We had to obsess over clear, repeatable frameworks for onboarding clients, rolling out campaigns and measuring success. Good SOPs don’t stifle creativity; they eliminate the guesswork so talented people can spend their energy being creative instead of hunting down where a file lives or who owns the next step. Structure isn’t the opposite of freedom. For most people, it’s the precondition for it.
The most rewarding part of this transition has been realizing that many people on our team have skills I couldn’t replicate if I tried. Give them that kind of leadership, clear SOPs and room to operate, and they don’t just meet expectations, they reshape what the agency is capable of doing.
That transformation didn’t happen in a vacuum. The ground underneath our entire industry has moved over the past year, faster than most agencies are willing to admit.
Here is what I’ve become convinced of over the last twelve months: artificial intelligence is changing how human beings learn, discover and decide what to buy faster than any technology in recorded history. Not the fastest since the internet. The fastest, period.
Consider the runway. The printing press took generations. Radio and television took decades. The internet and the smartphone took years. Generative AI took months as ChatGPT hit 100 million users faster than any consumer product ever built. And it rewired the most valuable behavior in all of marketing: how a person goes from “I have a problem” to “I know what I’m buying.”
That path used to be long and messy with searches, a page of blue links, a review, a video or a friend’s opinion. Every step was a place where earned media or a sharp piece of content could tip the scales. Now, a person can ask a chat window a question in plain English and get a synthesized answer with the recommendations already made. The blue links are gone. The consideration set isn’t built by the consumer scrolling—it’s built by a model deciding which sources to trust and which brands to name.
That is the whole game now, and it has a name most executives have never heard: Generative Engine Optimization (GEO). For twenty years, we optimized to rank on a page to be one of ten options a human would scroll past. GEO flips it. The goal is no longer to be on the page. It’s to be the answer and the source the machine pulls from when someone asks it what to buy and who to trust.
And here’s what most people miss: that shift makes earned media more valuable, not less. The credible, third-party coverage we’ve fought to secure is exactly what these models weigh most when deciding who to cite. Great PR was always about earning trust you couldn’t buy. Now that trust is training data. The front page of the newspaper has become the first sentence of an AI’s answer, and getting your client into that sentence is the new craft.
But understanding what changed is only half our job. The other half is understanding why and turning it into a plan a client can act on before their competitors do. And the why is as old as commerce: people remove friction. Nobody ever loved running fourteen searches to buy a pressure washer; they tolerated it because it was the only path. The moment a cleaner one appeared, they took it instantly, without nostalgia. That’s not a trend. It’s human nature, and it isn’t going to reverse.
PR and marketing are evolving just as fast, which means clients look up one day to find the plays they’d run for a decade quietly stopped working. They’re not paying us to be surprised alongside them. They’re paying us to have seen it coming, explain it in plain terms and hand them a roadmap for a world where the customer’s first conversation about their product happens with a machine.
That’s why our team didn’t just double down on legacy PR or generic digital ads. As the old plays stalled, they built and launched entirely new service lines: automated e-commerce email architectures, first-party data programs and deep-dive market research for private equity firms navigating volatile sectors.
Clients are drowning in data right now but starving for direction. They don’t want fluff or loud promises; they want a clear roadmap based on hard intelligence. Seeing our team author those roadmaps without me directing every sentence has been the ultimate proof that the move was worth it.
It has also changed who I’m looking for in the first place. In a hybrid or remote environment, I care very little about a pristine logo on a resume or where someone went to school. What I care about is curiosity, accountability and a drive to solve messy problems.
And I’ll say something that runs against every instinct I built over twenty years in this business: the twenty-somethings are the future of our agency, and it isn’t close.
For a long time, experience was the edge. The person who’d worked the most launches and built the deepest Rolodex won, and that’s still worth something. But the answer-first world our clients now live in is not one you can study your way into from the outside. You either grew up inside it, or you’re translating it.
The people entering our workforce right now have never known a version of discovery that wasn’t algorithmic. They didn’t learn to use AI tools; they think in them. They form purchase decisions the exact way the market is now moving, fast, conversational, synthesized and trust-first, because it isn’t a skill they picked up. It’s their native language. When I want to understand where consumer behavior is heading, I don’t reach for a whitepaper. I watch how the twenty-four-year-old on my team actually decides what to buy on a Tuesday night. That is an enormous unfair advantage, and it would be malpractice not to build around it.
So the shape of our roster is changing. I still lean hard on my veterans. But I’m increasingly pairing that with digital natives who read the new terrain the way the rest of us read a paved road.
We are finding a specific type of person thrives here—people with an entrepreneurial spirit who want to carve out their own path without playing corporate politics. In an era where climbing the ladder at a big corporate shop usually means changing companies every 18 months, giving people a place to build something of their own inside our walls has become our biggest competitive advantage.
Running a company across multiple time zones while relocating your life 2,000 miles across the country will teach you real quick what is load-bearing and what is just noise.
I’m grateful for the heatwave that forced us to pull over a year ago, and I’m even more grateful for the team that kept the engine running while we built something better. Here’s to Year Two in North Carolina.
