5 business problems I’m good at solving

My career has been a little hard to explain sometimes. I’ve worked at big companies, startups, in sales, marketing, editorial, product, and just about everything in between. You can see my full career timeline here.

But when I zoom out and take a bird’s-eye view, there are some common threads. 

The following are some business problems I’m good at solving:

1. You have something good, but there’s no system around it.

When I joined Men’s Fitness, the magazine was well known at the time, but the digital side of the business was another story. There was barely an editorial operation at all. We had no calendar, contributor network, content strategy, or even much of a social presence. A lot of the content was repurposed print material dumped online. So we started building one.I initially worked closely with the site director at the time to map out what we should cover, where the gaps were, who we were trying to reach, and what we could realistically own. Then came writers, workflows, SEO, social, analytics, and eventually a much higher volume of content.

We got very aggressive around search, especially around workout plans, programs, and emerging fitness talent. Traffic grew from roughly 3 million to 13.8 million, and the social audience went from around 150,000 to 3.3 million. 

Then the problem changed again. Once we started producing at scale, we needed to make sure we weren’t just creating junk. So the next phase was better editing, smarter franchises, better packaging, and having the whole thing feel more polished.

All of this required processes, data analysis, and a little bit of hard-to-explain intuition about what to do.

What this took: systems thinking, editorial operations, audience strategy, SEO, analytics, judgment

If you need help with building a content or marketing operation from scratch, or fixing one that isn’t scaling, reach out here.

2. You’re producing a lot of stuff, but very little of it is memorable.

Another example from Men’s Fitness: We could have kept publishing more and more workouts, but instead I started to turn some of them into actual programs with an identity. 

“Redemption” was one of them, and came from a pretty simple feeling: you’ve wasted some time, let some things slide, and you want this to be the year you get it back. “Reconstruction” was a similar concept. The workouts obviously mattered, but so did the name, the story around them, the rollout, and the feeling they were tapping into. People remembered them, and I still hear from people who remember them more than a decade later. 

I brought some of that thinking into NEOU, too. They had an enormous library of standalone video workouts and classes, but there wasn’t much of a reason to come back tomorrow. So I pushed us towards structured programs with progressions and a purpose. 

There’s a lot of messaging that “more is better”, but ultimately what’s most important is that what you’re making needs to become something people can recognize, follow, care about, and feel a connection to.

What this took: product thinking, positioning, naming, emotional storytelling, editorial taste, audience empathyIf you need help with turning undifferentiated content, products, or programs into something people actually remember, reach out here.

3. You know who your audience is, but you’re treating them all the same.

When it came to Spartan, “people who do Spartan races” wasn’t really one audience. There were first-timers who were nervous about finishing, experienced racers trying to improve their times, and a lot of people who mostly just wanted an edge over their friends for bragging rights.

Then there were people outside the existing racer base who already shared a lot of the same mentality: CrossFit and hybrid athletes, endurance athletes, ‘ninja warriors,’ and other people who liked hard training and competition.

The challenge was figuring out where those groups were different, where they overlapped, and what Spartan could make for each of them.

We developed first-timer training plans, skill-based training plans, and athlete collaborations or campaigns that were designed to pull an adjacent community into the brand. 

The brand has always been very clear, but bringing new people in and retaining the existing community all required a variety of different activities. 

What this took: audience segmentation, cultural fluency, subject-matter expertise, product thinking, partnership strategy

If you need help with understanding your audience more deeply or finding credible adjacent audiences for growth, reach out here.

4. You have all the pieces, but you’re doing too much work to make them useful.

At both Men’s Fitness and NEOU, we had creators, workout programs, editorial, social, email, paid media, and the creators’ own audiences. The opportunity was getting all of those things to work together instead of treating each one like a separate project.

If we were bringing in an athlete or fitness creator, I wanted the relationship to do more work than produce a workout. Could we build a program around them? Tell their story editorially? Create social content? Have them promote it to their own audience? Support it with paid? Launch it through email? The more coordinated the pieces were, the more useful the whole thing became.

I approached Spartan with a similar view. A training program could help someone prepare for a race, give editorial and email something useful to talk about, give sponsorships something to sell, and ultimately help drive race registrations. And when Spartan needed production infrastructure for its training app, I realized NEOU already had the studio, production, and technical capabilities to provide it, so I connected the two companies. 

I still work this way. At Prenuvo, a well-researched, medically reviewed piece of content shouldn’t live once on a blog and die there. It can become social, newsletter content, product education, sales enablement, and sometimes the foundation for a larger campaign.

I’m usually looking for the same thing: where are we duplicating effort, and how can one good idea, asset or capability do more work?

What this took: systems thinking, cross-functional orchestration, resourcefulness, commercial judgment, operational efficiency

If you need help with making your content, channels, teams, and assets work harder together, reach out here.

5. Your product makes sense inside the company, but it’s harder to understand for the customer.

When you work inside a company, you live with the product every day. Eventually, things that are incredibly complicated start to feel obvious, but they usually aren’t obvious to everyone else.

That was one of the first things I noticed at Prenuvo. It’s a fascinating product, but whole body MRI is complicated, relatively unfamiliar, and not something most people have spent much time thinking about. Some of the information existed, but it wasn’t always organized around the questions I thought a potential customer would actually have, such as: What can this find? What can’t it find? How does the technology work? How is it different from other scans? Why would I consider doing this if I feel healthy?

And those aren’t just technical questions. When it comes to people’s health, it’s highly emotional. People can be curious, skeptical, proactive, anxious, afraid of what they might find or unsure whether knowing more is even a good thing. Understanding the product means understanding where someone’s head might be when they’re considering it.

A lot of my work involved building the content systems around both sides of that: better product education, expert commentary, medical sourcing and clearer terminology, but also stories and ideas that made proactive health feel more relevant to someone’s actual life.

The challenge with a complicated and new-ish product is understanding what someone needs to know, what they may be feeling, and how to communicate both without stripping away the complexity that makes the product credible.

What this took: product marketing, customer empathy, positioning, editorial judgment, subject-matter fluency, trust-building

If you need help with making a complicated product easier for customers to understand, trust, and care about, reach out here.