A journey of lessons and luck, welcome to SCORCH 3.0
I am constantly trying to find a balance between being a #GirlDad and a CEO for two growing businesses. PingPilot is a conversational marketing platform that was recently featured in Forbes and is gaining traction. An idea that started as “Wouldn't it be cool if you could just click a button on page 4 of an eBook and get the right person inside of a business?” has turned into a full-blown software company.
SCORCH is a LinkedIn Content Partner and has recently reached the five-year milestone to be eligible as a preferred vendor for Microsoft. We are more resilient than ever, we're building the rocket ship as we're flying it, and have a renewed focus on growth by creating a diverse and inclusive culture of people that genuinely want to win.
Click-to-Human® is about giving people their time back; it's a brilliant business move to measure ROI through content, email, web, social, and paid ads. It's a human need to be heard, recognized, and validated. It's a technology for you to get what you want when you want it. It's that thing that you didn't know was possible and when you interact with it, you just wonder how you didn't have it already.
In 2009
we started building an agency in St. Louis, Missouri
that started from literally nothing. Our first clients were small government contracts and social media campaigns for local restaurants. Over time we got better, grew smarter, and figured out what made the business work. The real strategy was stay in business long enough for my friend Jason Miller from college to land at a big company so we could do some work together. Not exactly a rocket-science business plan, but somehow it worked.
Leveraging my B2C experience in Liquor, Spirits, and Beer marketing, we set our course with SCORCH to fuel brand activation for Plato's Closet, Dos Lunas Tequila, St. James Winery, and in 2012, Jason landed in Silicon Valley. We quickly pivoted the business from integrated marketing systems for local businesses here in St. Louis to designing full-on marketing campaigns for Marketo, LinkedIn, and Microsoft.
Over the last decade, my world has drastically changed. My wife and I welcomed our first child. A girl named Lucille. Lucy is now 10 and is the female version of myself in personality and character. My wife constantly reminds me that "she's you!" in the most loving way possible. We have since had two more daughters: Simone (we call her Mona for short) is a blue-eyed firecracker, and Chloe is a rambunctious toddler with an endless appetite for veggie straws.
I've also grown a tremendous amount in these last 10 years. I started naive, trusting, and easy-going and over the last decade I've become measured, calculated, and consistent. I've gotten stronger and more vigilant.
This post is really the first of its kind. I'm writing for the first time in a long time. I will continue to keep working on being a better leader, a better person, a better partner, and hopefully — a better writer. We’re taking the gov'nor off, setting the course for "moonshot" success, and can't wait to show you what we do next.