I studied economics, and my first job was at the business school at the University of Chicago. I earned a certificate in Financial Decision Making at UChicago while waiting to start the MBA program. I had dreams of being a financial trader or investment banker, but then I fell in love with direct marketing.
I started out managing a $5 million budget for the University of Chicago Booth School of Business Executive Education program. We invested heavily in direct mail lists. We'd rent lists from publications like the Harvard Business Review and send brochures to people who subscribed to the HBR physical edition delivered to their homes.
This was an amazing channel for us. I used to have dreams that Harvard had cut us off from that list.
We were also running Google Ads. We'd spend over $50 every time someone searched "Exec Ed" and clicked on our ad. Sounds expensive, but the class cost $10,000 with almost all fixed costs, so we could afford to spend $9,000 on average and still make $1,000 per person. Then we started investing in LinkedIn ads, and I took those over too.
For each channel we tracked signups and revenue, and traced those numbers back to our ad costs. The channels and lists with the best numbers got more spend.
I left Booth because a startup I was moonlighting at blew up after I started running their ad campaigns. Through Facebook ads, I took them from $5,000 a day in revenue to $25,000 within a week. We went on to grow that company to a $35-million-a-year business before I left.
While working at KeySmart, I started my marketing agency, Discovery Marketing. We're a Facebook marketing partner, and we excel at conversion-focused web design, video production, Google Ads, and Facebook ads. I've worked with a mix of e-commerce stores and professionals across many fields.
Now I work with professionals to help them advertise themselves so they can grow their business. I take all the knowledge they've built up over time and use it to create sales pages that sell.
Once the website and videos are down, we start advertising to bring in new customers. And we keep a financial eye on every spend, making sure the value you receive from our ads is tracked and that you're generating a profit, not just spending money to see no results come in.