About

I was born in 1977 in Cranston, Rhode Island. My family moved to the Chicago area shortly thereafter. My father was self-employed as an industrial sales guy, and mom’s job was raising us. In around 1982 our family purchased a piano and my older brother Jon started taking lessons. Some of my earliest memories are of sounding out “Mary Had A Little Lamb” and other little tunes on that piano. I think about 6 months later I got a hand-me-down guitar from a cousin and never put the thing down. We got a family dog around that same time – a west highland white terrier named Heidi. Little did I know that music and canines would be with me for the rest of my life.

I remember the day I got my first full sized guitar. It was in 1983 or so, a dark brown, steel stringed import called a “Madeira.” It was absolutely HUGE for my little body! The sound was incredible, though – I still own that guitar and play it almost every night. It was manufactured in the late 60′s as a low-end import by the Guild company, but it sounds a hell of a lot like a Martin.

Either by way of boredom or some really stupid decisions, things took a turn for the worse in high school. Dad remarried and I didn’t get along with the stepfamily all that well. Mom was having a tough time keeping us under control and I got wrapped up in the drug scene in a big way, particularly psychedelics. If not for a great teacher named Mr. Comstock, my band, and some great friends, I’m not sure that I would have made it out of high school in one piece.

I cleaned things up my senior year but had no idea what my plan would be. All I cared about was playing guitar and avoiding the drug scene. After a failed attempt at enlistment with the armed forces, I applied and was accepted to Coe College in Cedar Rapids, IA. I had graduated high school with a 2.4 GPA but got a 32 on my ACT. When the admissions panel asked me to explain that, I just shrugged and said “I get kinda bored.” They must’ve thought that was funny because it earned me a scholarship for guitar. That was one of the turning points in my life. I would not have been able to afford college but for that scholarship.

After a couple of semesters as a music ed major, I realized that my life was about more than just that. I changed my major to bachelor of arts, psychology and bachelor of arts, music. I joined a fraternity (Lambda Chi Alpha) that was more about community service and academics than beer bongs and house parties. Thanks to the support of my brothers, I graduated magna cum laude, having written honor’s theses in both music and psychology. My music thesis was an instructional method on playing a native Lao instrument called the khaen. My psych thesis was about the relationship between social support and academic achievement in at-risk adolescents.

I loved psychology and helping kids, so my first job out of school was as a counselor at an inpatient facility for juvenile sexual perpetrators. That was a really hard job – working with these young guys, trying to help them not turn in to full-blown sexual predators. Not for me. I moved back to Chicago and took a position as a counselor at an inpatient clinic for adolescents who were dually diagnosed with a mental illness and substance abuse addiction. All the while, I was trying to hold down these jobs and play guitar on the weekend. That’s when I reached a breaking point. I don’t remember when or why or how, but after a couple years I realized that I couldn’t continue to help these kids and live the musician lifestyle. It wasn’t fair to the kids to show up all tired and half-ass it, and I knew something had to give. At the end of the day I just couldn’t live without playing guitar. I sold out my dream of helping kids and took a job working for my old man as a sales guy.

I learned some of my best sales lessons working with Dad. He is the consummate problem solver, a great negotiator and phenomenal bullshitter. (I take after him a lot.) What I couldn’t do, though, was balance work and home. Every time I failed to make a sale, I felt like I was mooching off Dad, and I couldn’t do that. (The industrial sales business also has really really long sales cycles – frequently a year or more – and I got impatient.) The good that came out of working for Dad was that I saw the step family more. We started to bond in a pretty cool way. However the self-imposed work stress got to me and, once again, something had to give. I sold out (again) and took a job as a telemarketer for Enesco Group, Inc. I also got involved with a band and re-connected with a high school friend and bassist named Corey Owens.

My job at Enesco was to call small or deactivated accounts and sell them Precious Moments figurines and other collectibles over the phone. The only thing that kept me sane for those couple of years was my sales manager, Linda, from whom I learned a lot about managing people. One of my clients was this lady named Liz who told me she did some internet marketing. I had no idea what that was. She taught me a bit about that business and “whipped me in to shape,” as she’d say. Within a year I had a sizable account base, 90% of which were .com accounts. Management wanted to see if I could turn around an underperforming territory, so I was relocated to Las Vegas in 2004. This was a tough decision – the band was starting to play some pretty big festivals and clubs and we were gaining momentum.

Unfortunately, this was the same year Enesco changed CRMs and went to PeopleSoft. Best as I can tell, they were grossly over-sold by their account executive. The first few months were an absolute train wreck and the warehouse shipped almost no product, which was bad for a regional sales guy who got paid when product shipped. I got my info out on Monster.com and was recruited to work at a company called DataX, a subsidiary of SellingSource.com. Around the same time I met a very intelligent, extremely attractive woman who is now named Stephanie Lilly.

After just a few months at DataX promoted to sales manager of another SellingSource company, PartnerWeekly. PartnerWeekly was (and still is) the undisputed leader in the affiliate marketing space for specialty finance. My buddy Corey came out to Vegas to work for me as VP of Operations. I moved up the ranks there and in 2008 was promoted to president. I left PartnerWeekly in August of 2009.

Today I still play a bunch of guitar. I’m friends with quite a few of those guys from high school who helped me so much. Two of them (Joe and Corey) live in Las Vegas and still work at PartnerWeekly. I have 4 incredible dogs. I have an amazing family. Me and the stepfamily patched things up and I’m closer to them than I ever would have thought possible. My brother Jon is a doctor of oceanography and aikido instructor. My younger brother Rob works on a farm in Hawaii. My stepbrother Mike is a CTO at a tech startup in Dallas. My other step-siblings, Katie and Patrick, still live in Chicago. Pat is an AK-47 gunsmith and Katie has been pregnant a bunch of times now – all of her boyfriends are really great guys. Pam, my stepmom, works at a school district, and Dad is still in industrial sales.

Looking back on my first 30 or so years, I’ve had some really incredible experiences that I never would have anticipated when I was getting in trouble in high school. Never in a million years would I have thought that I’d play a show at Taste of Chicago or Buddy Guy’s Legends when I was 27, present a paper on Lao folk instruments to a group of acousticians in Berlin, or perform at Pearl Harbor. Or be president of a $100 million dollar internet marketing company. Or be an executive at a two-time Inc 500 company.

In April of 2010, I decided it would be time to take what I’ve learned and apply it to my own business. Today I’m freelancing for a few online and offline advertisers and building and investing in a number of online and offline marketing ventures. I am developing products in the weight loss, work from home, and finance verticals.

-Joe

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