So it's a somewhat winding road that I took. I went to Frostburg State University and was originally on art education, major. But then I realized quickly that I didn't have the patience for all the bureaucracy of a school system. And so I sort of cut that short just became an art major. So when I graduated, I really didn't know what I wanted to be when I grew up, so to speak I was working at an aquatic nursery all through college. So a friend of mine and I actually started a business building waterfalls and water gardens and that sort of thing. Then I quickly learned that I'm not the best person for seasonal backbreaking work. I have a bad back, and I'm not good with downtime. So, I got out of that. And, I was in some sales roles for a while, and I really wanted to get back into marketing and creativity. Marketing has always been sort of my calling in some shape, form or another. I did all the marketing for our small business when we started. And so I actually got a job in 98 with a Web design firm. And so that was very new back then. And, I worked there for a little while and then, actually got a friend of mine, a job there, and, he and I were sorts of running the place and decided that a long story short that we felt like we could do something on our own. That was is a bit more to our liking. So we started Wood Street, and I was doing project management, writing, marketing, sales, all kinds of stuff there. I actually, in the last few months, I just sold my shares in my business and took a position at the company you see here, Wellspring search. I got to the point where websites are being very commoditized. And, a design and development firm really wasn't what I envisioned my company to become solely. So I always wanted to tear off in a marketing path. So I ended up meeting my now boss, Carl Hindle, and, we just talked a lot, and we felt like we were really on the same page when it came to marketing and where the Internet's had. I sold all my shares and I went to work for Wellspring. And so now I'm still doing sales. Always do some sort of sales. It's just a kind of nature of a small business role. But I'm doing a lot of content marketing and I'm doing a lot more marketing just in general. And so it's been kind of a serendipitous path of just following opportunities as they present themselves. That's how I ended up where I am today.

They were definitely challenging. It was exciting though because I'm now working for a company that does all the things that I get excited about. And so it was a lot of learning. It was a lot of figuring out, my role specifically and trying to find opportunities and trying to get my head around how I wanted to market this firm. So there was a lot of sort of figuring out processes. And I think it was just a matter of at a lot of meetings with my boss, Carl. And we did a lot of a sort of strategy discussions. And, I have ideas all the time. He has ideas all the time. Another guy who runs it with us called Corey. He has ideas all the time. So the three of us kind of check each other a lot. So it was just a matter of learning to work with a new crew and learning to really fully take advantage of all these new opportunities or that we're in front of me. And so it was exciting. It was a little scary, cause it's not my company, and, it was a little different, but it definitely was exciting to come on board. The next few months are really gonna be about, you're trying to build the business trying to bring in more clients trying to streamline our marketing in house. When you're a marketing firm, you're the client that suffers the most yourself because you're worried about all the other clients. And, you know, they come first, obviously. So we were really making a point of forcing ourselves to pay attention to our own marketing. So I'm doing a lot of that management and working with Corey on that, in terms of getting us out there. So we're really trying to really target our area, which is the DC metro area, but also nationwide. We have the service that we can easily target all those areas. And we're also very interested in growth. it's market growth. So I believe we're probably gonna hire if all things go well, we'll probably hire another 3 to 4 people in the next, I would say 6 to 8 months. That's the future so far.

I don't work a lot with the tools. We're mainly working on the dashboard. So at least we have designers and developers who work in their set of tools, and I don't really know what those are, specifically, but for me, I work a lot in SharpSpring, which is our marketing automation platform. We work a lot with Ahrefs, with SEMrush. There's a bunch of other ones, because mainly what we're trying to do is we're trying to figure out traffic patterns and how to build traffic and build link profiles and that sort of thing. So working in a lot of an SEO and SEM, dashboards, mainly, obviously, in Google AdWords in the social media marketing round. So, the more technical stuff is not really my area of expertise but probably is as far as I could get into to answer that question, It just depends on what the need is of the client. The thing is like for us. We're tool-agnostic in the sense that we use what we need to find the truth and to find out what's going on. So, sometimes it maybe we spend one client a ton of time and on the Google platform. And sometimes we spend a ton of time in the say, Facebook or LinkedIn platform for advertising. And then what? Spending a ton of time and say hub spot or Sharp spring or marcato from their marketing automation? So it really depends on what the client's needs are. And sometimes the client will dictate that we have one client who is the hardcore like Microsoft team. And they use my dynamics and they use, I forgot the name of the marking automation tool, but it just it really just depends on what the client needs are. And I think that's important, too, to think about, especially if you're getting in digital marketing is you need to have a good understanding of some of the more popular platforms. But don't be scared to open a new platform and try it around because the client is always gonna sort of dictate which way you go.