FoundHive was built because we got tired of watching agencies do the work badly.
Fifteen years, hundreds of businesses, tens of millions in ad spend — most of it behind the scenes. FoundHive is what happens when the person who built the strategy is also the one on your Zoom call.
How I got here.
I started my career in 2011 doing sales on behalf of Google — finding businesses that had never advertised on Google before and getting them set up with their first campaigns. I did it for about a year before I realized I didn't love sales. I wanted to get under the hood and actually understand how the whole thing worked.
So I started my first company, AdWords for Cabbies. This was before Uber was a real thing. I worked with taxi companies and individual cab owners, running local Google Ads to keep their phones ringing. Then Uber showed up, and unsurprisingly, that business slowly fizzled out.
From there I went to EIG — the company that owned Domain.com, Bluehost, HostGator and a long list of other hosting brands. That's where I started to understand the internet beyond advertising: hosting, infrastructure, tech stacks, funnels, how larger organizations actually operate online.
Four years, fifteen countries, an accidental education.
Around that time I was obsessed with the movie Into the Wild. I decided I wanted to backpack through Central America and see if I could figure out how to work remotely along the way.
I left home with a few clients and picked up more work as I traveled. I built websites, managed Google Ads campaigns, and took pretty much any digital marketing work I could find on Craigslist, PeoplePerHour, and through referrals. I even built a few websites in exchange for free food and accommodation at hostels.
Looking back, that period probably taught me more than any formal job could have. Every random project forced me to learn a different platform, solve a different problem, or figure out another way businesses could use the internet to grow. What was supposed to be a few months of traveling turned into almost four years across fifteen countries.
While working at an island campground in Cambodia, I met a guy from Perth who told me that if I ever made it to Australia, I could crash on his couch until I found work. So I did.
Hands on experience put to work
In 2015 I landed a job at an award-winning digital agency in Perth as a PPC specialist. They eventually sponsored my visa, and what I thought might be another short stop turned into almost five years in Australia.
That experience changed my career. I worked my way up to leading a team of about twelve SEO specialists, PPC specialists, and account managers. I personally managed some of the agency's largest accounts while being responsible for the performance of the wider client portfolio.
That was the first time I realized how far ahead my hands-on implementation experience had put me. I'd spent years actually doing the work — building websites, troubleshooting campaigns, jumping between platforms, figuring things out without a safety net. That practical experience turned out to be a huge advantage over people who'd only ever done marketing from a slide deck.
I loved agency life. The pace, the variety, the fact that priorities could completely change from one day to the next.
Back to the U.S. and the start of FoundHive.
My wife and I moved back to the U.S. in late 2019 and I started taking on more clients of my own. A lot of it was white-label work for agencies across the U.S. and Australia — behind-the-scenes execution across hundreds of businesses, industries, platforms, and business models. It was another crash course, at a scale most people never get.
Eventually there weren't enough hours in the day for me to keep doing it all myself. FoundHive officially launched in 2023.
Why FoundHive started
There wasn't one dramatic moment. It was years of watching the same broken model play out.
Because I spent so much time doing white-label work behind the scenes, I had a pretty unique view into how a lot of agencies actually operated. And the pattern was almost always the same.
A polished account manager with limited hands-on experience would own the client relationship. The real work got pushed down to increasingly junior, overworked staff. Things got sold without being scoped properly, and the delivery team was expected to somehow make it work. The office had bean bags and an arcade machine and a lot of talk about "culture" — except everyone was too busy and burnt out to enjoy any of it.
And everything came back to billable hours. The cheaper the person doing the work, the better the agency's margin. Which always bothered me — because the economics of the agency weren't aligned with what was actually best for the client.
I saw junior marketers managing accounts they had no business owning yet. I saw agency leaders selling services they'd never personally implemented. Training was often a link to a Skillshare course and then a live client account. And because turnover was so high, a surprising amount of running an agency became an HR exercise — hire, train, replace, repeat.
I wanted to build an agency where the people making the recommendations actually knew how to implement them. Where senior people stayed close to the work. Where nothing got sold just because it could go on an invoice. And where the incentive was to solve the problem, not maximize the invoice.
That's the foundation FoundHive was built on.
The expert who built your plan is on every call.
Most agencies put a junior account manager or a polished "client success" hire in front of you. Your questions get relayed to a senior somewhere. The answers come back two days later — often with something lost in translation.
At FoundHive, I'm on every client call. My specialist team — SEO, paid media, HubSpot, web, analytics — works in the background on the plan we built together. You never explain your business to someone new. You never wait a week for a strategic answer. And you never pay the billable hours that get burned on that relay.
If you've hired an agency before, you already know how much that costs you. If you haven't, ask anyone who has.
What we believe.
Strategy without implementation is a $30k paperweight.
SEO shouldn't be arguing with paid. Sales shouldn't be arguing with marketing. If your channels aren't talking, the plan is broken.
The person who wrote your strategy should be the person on your Zoom.
We measure pipeline and revenue. Impressions are receipts, not results.
If you can't tell what we did last month, we've already failed you.
AI is a tool, not a strategy. It multiplies good operators and exposes bad ones.
One coordinated team. Six connected capabilities.
Most agencies sell services as a checklist. FoundHive runs them as a system. Every capability feeds the next — search feeds paid, paid feeds CRM, CRM feeds sales, sales feeds the next piece of content. When they're connected, the whole thing compounds.
Fifteen years, on the ground.
The number matters less than the variety behind it. Small businesses trying to generate their first consistent leads. Established companies trying to fix marketing that's stopped working. Larger organizations untangling complicated websites, CRMs, ad accounts, and stacks. After fifteen years, there aren't many digital marketing problems I haven't seen in some form.
Partners and platforms.
Certifications are table stakes. Fifteen years of implementation experience is the actual credential.
When I'm not building marketing systems.
I live in San Clemente, California with my wife and our three kids. When I'm not working, I'm usually golfing, fishing, surfing, doing Jiu Jitsu classes with my oldest son, or taking my three-year-old out for ice cream.
My family is also a big part of why I've always been willing to work harder than most people probably consider reasonable. I love what I do, but ultimately the business exists to create a great life for the people I care about most.
What's getting in the way of growth?
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