Somewhere between my second cup of coffee and scrolling through another glossy agency website, it hit me — I’m not them.
You know the kind of site I’m talking about: sharp graphics, smiling suits, “Grow your business today!” plastered over photos of office plants and exposed brick. This morning it was a modern Digital Marketing Studio out of Austin. Their whole thing is HVAC marketing. HVAC! The new gold rush of ad agencies. And as I sat there, half-awake and reading their promises of more clicks, more leads, more something, I realized exactly what I’m not.
I’m not the guy selling you a dream about more customers.
I’m the guy helping you handle the customers you already have — the ones that are breaking your systems because success came faster than you were ready for.
The Difference Between Selling the Dream and Fixing the Machine
Marketing studios sell the dream of growth. It’s a shiny pitch: more leads, more conversions, more people calling your phone. They’ll use words like “optimization” and “performance,” but most of it rides on hope — the hope that the numbers will look better next month.
I sell the reality of function. My world is data pipelines, analytics dashboards, tracking tags, backend systems — the machinery that makes sense of chaos when that dream actually shows up at your door.
See, the marketing crowd plays to hunger. They chase the folks desperate for business, who believe the next ad campaign might be the magic ticket. My people are the opposite. They’ve already found demand. They’re knee-deep in it, maybe drowning a little. Their online store is glitching. Their analytics don’t match their revenue. Their staff spends more time copy-pasting than creating.
Those are my people. The ones who need to fix the plumbing of their digital world, not repaint the front door.
Truth in the Numbers
There’s a funny thing about truth in data. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. Tools like Google Analytics, SEMrush, and all the rest are meant to illuminate, but they can just as easily be weaponized to tell comforting lies.
“Look! Your impressions are up!”
“Your engagement rate grew 20%!”
But are you actually making money?
Are the numbers connected to reality — or to a PowerPoint deck meant to justify an invoice?
That’s the part that eats at me. Because I know how to pull the real numbers — the ones that show what’s actually happening, not what looks good in a meeting.
I’m not here to spin metrics. I’m here to make systems honest.
What I Actually Do
I build and fix.
I wire data between platforms.
I automate the boring stuff.
I make dashboards that tell the truth.
I engineer systems so businesses can grow without falling apart.
I don’t call that “digital marketing.” It’s closer to digital engineering. The quiet kind of work that rarely trends on LinkedIn, but keeps real businesses running when the glitter wears off.
 |
Find our community collaborations at treevine.org |
That’s the part I love — solving the puzzle of growth. Every bottleneck is a clue, every breakdown a blueprint for what needs to come next. My job isn’t to promise more business; it’s to make sure your business can handle more business — cleanly, efficiently, and without losing the rhythm that made it successful in the first place.
A Different Kind of Client
If you’re out there, you know who you are. You’re not hunting for leads — you’re hunting for sanity. You’ve got more business than your current systems can handle, and the cracks are starting to show.
You’re not desperate. You’re overloaded.
You don’t need hype. You need help.
That’s where I come in. Not to promise growth, but to make sure the growth you already earned doesn’t crush you.
The Takeaway
So yeah, I’m not some geek powered studio. I don’t sell HVAC or Roofing miracles or marketing dreams. I sell solutions. I sell systems that work. I sell truth in data. I sell peace of mind when the numbers finally make sense and your Gi/Go ratio is maximized. Making your "Garbage Out" (Go) less than your "Garbage In" (Gi) benefits all of us.
This morning, staring at that glossy website in Austin, I found my clarity:
They sell the chase.
I build the infrastructure.
And there’s a world of difference between the two.