I design it, build it, shoot it, and get it found.

In February 2013 I took a job at the Executive Inn & Suites on the Oakland waterfront. The title changed a few times over the years, but the job was always the same: I was the IT department, the marketing team, and the webmaster, and there was nobody else. If the booking engine broke at nine on a Saturday, that was me. If the email campaign went out with the wrong rate, that was me too.

Being the only person teaches you what guests actually do. They arrive from a search for a hotel near the airport or the cruise terminal, and they want a price and a room, not a tour of the brand. So the email offers went to people based on why they had come, and the website was built around booking direct. Six and a half years later, visitors from Google were up 2,000% and one year of that email had brought in around $1.5M in bookings. I shot the photography and video for the current site myself, and I still work with the same ownership group. The hotel case study has the numbers and their limits.

Being the only person also teaches you which jobs can't depend on memory. Email templates that could not go out without a price on them, reports that ran every week whether or not anyone asked. I still build that way.

After the hotel I ran marketing for a vacuum-equipment manufacturer, where I built and ran an online catalog of 500+ products on my own. Then two years contracting for an agency, selling and building video-first hotel websites. In 2024 I spent seven months as the digital marketing manager for a home-services company in Pleasanton, where I led a rebuild that grew the site to 3,000+ pages, one for every service in every town it served. That project is why “one page per town” shows up so often in my work: it's the clearest case where the checks have to be automatic, because no one can proofread three thousand pages by hand.

In 2024 I started EstateFlow Digital, which builds websites and runs marketing for small businesses, and in 2025 I began building MantelMarketing, which offers a small-business website at a fixed monthly price. The work page has the projects, with what was measured and what wasn't.

The hotel needed photographs and there was no budget for a photographer, so I became one. That turned into House & Home Photography in 2020: real estate and hotel photography, video, drone, and 3D tours across the Bay Area, with a next-day turnaround for agents who need the listing up tomorrow. I still shoot. It's why every photograph on this site is mine, and why the websites I build for clients come with their own pictures instead of stock.

I make the big decisions and I do the building, which means the gap between “we should” and “it's done” is usually a day, not a month. I use AI tools the way I'd use a junior team: a written brief, checks on the finished work, and a review before anything ships. On the roofing company's site, for example, one of those checks makes sure every page uses business details the owner has confirmed.

I'd rather earn a visit than buy one. Paid channels have their place and I've run them for a decade, but a page that shows up on Google because it answers the question is something you own. An ad is a bill.

I studied computer engineering at Diablo Valley College and San Jose State. I earned an A.S.-T at DVC and left San Jose State before completing a bachelor's to take the hotel job. The résumé has the rest, with every figure sourced, and I'm on LinkedIn.