Several of them ran small businesses. Most of them never quite cracked the code on the marketing side of things, and watching that, year after year, planted something in me early. We never needed much, but money wasn't abundant either. I knew from a young age that I wanted to understand how businesses actually grow, and that I wanted to build a life with room in it for both family and freedom.

I started college at sixteen. The plan at the time was to become a nurse anesthetist, which is the kind of thing you decide at that age and mean seriously. I finished my generals and took a web design and marketing class on the side, mostly out of curiosity, and something clicked in a way that nursing never quite had. Around the same time, I apprenticed with a master electrician, because I was also considering the trades. I ended up choosing marketing, but the trades and the healthcare track both taught me something durable about how real work gets done.

I finished my degree in marketing and went straight into selling ERP software for manufacturing companies. Sales was deliberate. I wanted a skill that would apply to anything I built later, and a few years inside a B2B sales floor teaches you more about how businesses run than a decade of theory. I did well — consistently top ten in my department — but the whole time, the long-term goal was agency work.

The why had two halves. The first was personal: I wanted to help the kind of businesses the people I grew up around ran. Businesses that are well-run on the operational side and undersold on the marketing side. The second was aesthetic: I've always loved good marketing. Superbowl commercials as a kid. Cereal boxes at the breakfast table. A well-branded product is one of the most satisfying things in the world to me, and I wanted to spend my working life making more of them exist.

We started 4th Street earlier than either my wife Faith or I expected. I'd hit the ceiling at my sales job — COVID hiring freezes, no real path up — and we took the money we'd been saving for a house and started the agency instead. It was a bet on ourselves.

I couldn't have built this without Faith, and I couldn't have built it without my faith. Faith has been my steady partner and advocate through every decision that mattered. God has been a quieter kind of advisor, opening doors at the right moments and offering guidance at most of the turns. Every good thing about how this company has grown feels like a small miracle to me.

What I'm building toward isn't millions, exactly. It's freedom. The ability to live a present life with my family and my community, and to build something that helps other people do the same.

If we've met, you already know some of this. If we haven't yet, now you know a little.