I was not looking for a marketing answer. I was looking for a structural one.

Early in my career, I became obsessed with a simple question: why do some companies with strong products scale aggressively, while others with equal potential stall? Over the past 25 years, working inside startups and global organizations including Google and AT&T, I watched the same pattern repeat with remarkable consistency.

Founders build something real. Customers respond. Investors lean in. Momentum builds. And then, almost without exception, growth becomes harder than it should be. Not because the product weakens. Because the company has outgrown its narrative. Messaging that worked in founder-led conversations does not survive at scale. Positioning that lived in the CEO's head does not transmit through a forty-person sales team.

I call this narrative debtNarrative debtFounder-led storypaid40-person sales teamowedSeries B narrativeowedBalancecompounding, and it is the quiet tax most growth-stage companies pay without ever naming it.

As the founder of Misnomer Marketing, I partner with seed to Series B B2B founders and PE-backed portfolio companies to bring clarity, ownership, and discipline to brand and go-to-market strategy. I step in when traction is real but structure is missing, when a company has outgrown improvisation but has not yet institutionalized marketing leadership.

My work has helped clients raise more than $425 million in venture capital and achieve four successful exits totaling over $2.5 billion. The numbers matter, but the real work is translating vision into narrative, turning positioning into pipeline, and aligning product, sales, and marketing around a growth strategy that compounds.

Done well, marketing reduces friction, strengthens conviction in the boardroom, sharpens the company's signal in a crowded market, and builds brand equity that compounds long after any individual campaign has ended. Done poorly, it accelerates the wrong things, attracts the wrong customers, and creates the narrative debt that eventually stalls even the most promising companies.

That belief is the throughline of my forthcoming book, Nobody Knows What You Do, launching September 22, 2026. The book names the quiet problem I have watched play out inside companies at every stage of growth: the moment a company's internal clarity about what it does stops transmitting to the market. It distills 25 years of pattern recognition into the frameworks I use with founders today.

My earlier book, The Power of Relationships, is a companion read on how professional growth is built through authentic connection and earned trust.

I studied marketing and sports management at George Washington University, which turned out to be the right combination: one discipline about telling a story at scale, the other about what teams do when the story meets a scoreboard. My philosophy since then has stayed consistent. Strong brands and strong relationships are built intentionally, sustained through consistency, and tested in the moments when it would be easier to compromise them.