My story
Nobody remembers the batting coach
Which is, I've come to think, the whole point.
CRACK! Roar… Run.
CRACK! Roar… Run.
CRACK! Roar… Run.
Reggie Jackson stepped up to the plate four times in game six of the '77 World Series. The last three times, he launched the ball into the stands. Reggie didn't know it, but with each crack he pointed that bat towards me, five miles north of Yankee Stadium. The ground vibrated as the crowd roared. It was like they were calling me into the world.
I'd wait another nine days to be born and finally join the celebration.
It often takes time to know where you should be. That's certainly been my story.
The thesis
Everyone remembers Mr. October.
Nobody wrote down the name of his batting coach.
History didn't record the name, so let's call him Coach X. That same season, Coach X's instruction helped Graig Nettles hit 37 home runs, a career high, and Mickey Rivers bat .326. One man, quietly, behind three of the best hitting seasons on that roster.
It took me until 2024 to work out that I'd rather be Coach X than be the one under the lights.
Getting there
Life's path is rarely a straight line
I journeyed through a few inglorious roles before I worked out where I belonged. In order:
01
The mascot
Fresh out of Emory, I produced a television show that did not exist.
Part of the job was booking studio space. But when it came time to shoot, nothing happened. I helped recruit a host. There were no guests and no recordings. Then I noticed something more alarming: after weeks on the job, I hadn't been paid.
So I went to my boss and started asking questions. He fidgeted. His eyes started shooting left and right. And it became clear that the show was a mirage in the mind of this man. No sponsors. No show. Like a costumed mascot, I was faking a version of reality.
02
The bat boy
Near the action. Not in the action.
The next job was real, with a real paycheck. My cube lurked on the edge of the marketing team, and I'd lean in to listen through the five-foot carpeted walls. The more I listened, the more I knew that was where I wanted to be.
Eventually I squeezed through the fence when a graphic design position opened up, and got my marketing MBA at night. Playing time, finally.
03
The player
At 25 I raised my hand and said, “I think I can fix it.”
I was a marketing director in Atlanta at a company making toys and baby products for Target, Walmart and Toys“R”Us. Their flagship relaunch was failing in stores despite several agencies and a lot of money. As a new parent myself, I had a suspicion about why: we were still selling to the mothers of the '90s, and the people actually shopping now parented differently.
Nobody had accounted for that. We fixed the positioning, the logo and the packaging, and that work stood for more than a decade. Some of it is still on shelves.
It was the first time I understood that the marketing wasn't the problem. The agreement about the marketing was the problem.
04
The owner
I meant to get another marketing job. I accidentally started an agency.
I interviewed at an IT company, got left hanging for six weeks, and finally called the hiring manager and said: “Dave, I don't think you're going to hire me as your VP of marketing. What if I was your agency instead?” He said that would be terrific. Very suddenly, and entirely unintentionally, I was a CEO.
Estound ran for eighteen years. We won ColoradoBiz Magazine's best marketing and advertising agency award five years running, and I spoke twice at SXSW Interactive. In 2021 we published the Unified Marketing System, an attempt to unravel marketing for people who found it opaque.
Then I tried to scale. For two years I focused on sales while the team focused on everything else. Revenue tripled. Delivery suffered. The joy went out of it.
05
The coach
In October 2024, I started telling clients I was shutting it down.
I was playing too many roles on one team: player, captain, owner. I finally looked hard at which part I actually loved, and it wasn't being under the lights.
I'd rather coach a team of great players than be the one on the field. I make a bigger difference as the Coach X of marketing than I ever did as the guy swinging.
What I kept noticing
Companies don't fail at marketing because they're bad at it. They fail because they're not prepared.
Eighteen years of watching clients land in the win and loss columns, and the pattern barely changed. They jump straight to the ads, the email campaign, the SEO, the billboard, without the strategy that would make any of those work. Which more or less guarantees the outcome.
Any company can spend money without results. That part is easy. But in Moneyball, Billy Beane showed everyone there was another way: focus on the fundamentals that actually matter, and you achieve more while spending less. Getting on base won more games than swinging for the fence.
Most of my work now is helping people find their own version of getting on base.
Now
What coaching actually turned out to be
I see in-house marketing teams full of talent that isn't getting the results it should. Four out of five CEOs don't trust their marketing leadership; three out of four marketers don't feel set up to succeed. I've been on both ends of that, and these days I work in the gap.
The practice
Market research, marketing planning, and a small number of fractional CMO seats. Three different ways of putting something useful on the table between an executive team and its marketing.
Work with me →The book
Everyone Hates Marketing!: thirty thousand words for busy executives, and the framework underneath everything above.
The book →The room
Approved Vistage Worldwide speaker, Vistage member since 2019, adjunct professor of marketing, and host of ChairWaves.
Speaking →The next thing
Ophea, an AI-enabled qualitative research platform I founded, because the most expensive mistake in marketing is a good campaign aimed at a market you assumed.
Ophea →The rest of it
Things that aren't on the résumé
I read marketing poetry to the internet. I own a sliver of the Caledonian Braves, a wee Scottish football club. I once used the F-word more than a dozen times in five minutes in front of a full house at Denver's Oriental Theater, which is the sort of thing that follows a person around.
I'm the father of two children and innumerous bad ideas. I'm engaged to a badass ER nurse who I love sharing travel and shenanigans with; our first date went for 9 days and 5500 miles. I live eight stories above the longest, wickedest street in America with a geriatric pit bull and an ADHD pug. My personality tests tend to use words like “maverick” and “unmanageable.”
The people who make the biggest impact are the coaches.
From the background, the lights shine brighter on the team on the field. The ground shakes, and the crowd roars, and it was never going to be for me anyway.