Why I built Banks

For most of my career, I thought taking the next step also meant taking a step further away from the work.

That seemed to be how most everyone progressed along.

You prove you can do the work. Then you lead the people doing it. Eventually, you lead the people leading the people doing it. Your calendar fills with meetings, and your job becomes setting direction, giving feedback and trying to make good decisions with whatever information can fit onto a slide.

I've been following that path, and I was proud of it. I wanted to lead teams, have a seat in the bigger conversations and be trusted with the company – not just the campaign.

But I never stopped wanting to make things.

I still wanted to open the document and rewrite the headline. I wanted to see the ads, look at the numbers, sit with sales, question the brief and figure out why the thing that sounded so good in the meeting wasn’t working once it reached the real world.

And in the back of my mind, this all seemed like something I was supposed to outgrow.

At different points, I was encouraged to operate at a higher altitude. I understood the advice. A leader can’t be inside every project. When you’re constantly taking the work back from your team, you’re not leading them. You’re becoming the bottleneck.

I’ve probably crossed that line before.

But I also started to see the opposite problem. The further that marketing leaders got from the actual work, the easier it became to say things that sounded right or impressive in the boardroom but were almost impossible to make useful.

A strategy would be approved, and everyone would leave the room feeling aligned. Then someone had to turn it into a campaign, an email or a sentence.

That was usually where the truth showed up.

The audience wasn’t actually clear. The message was trying to say five things. The offer didn’t give anyone a reason to care. The team didn’t have the time or skills that the strategy assumed they had.

I’ve watched a plan sound intelligent until someone opened a blank doc and had to write the first line.

I don’t say that to dismiss strategy. I love strategy. I’ve built a career around it.

But I’ve come to believe that strategy isn’t something you finish before the work begins. You learn whether it’s good by trying to make it real.

When the people setting the direction are too far away from that process, something gets lost.

Work slows down. Context becomes thinner. Simple decisions turn into meetings because no one close enough to the work feels trusted to make them.

Then the opinions begin.

Marketing is especially vulnerable to this because everyone can react to it. Everyone has an opinion about a headline, knows whether they like a design or remembers an ad. People who’d never think to rewrite a line of code or edit a financial model feel completely comfortable rewriting the first sentence on a landing page.

Sometimes that input makes the work better.

Other times, a strong idea enters a review process and slowly loses everything that made it strong. Product needs it to be more precise. Sales wants three more benefits. Leadership wants it to feel "bigger." Someone doesn’t like the word “simple.” Another person joins the conversation late and suggests a direction that was already discussed three weeks ago.

Eventually, the work becomes something no one strongly objects to.

But that’s not the same as something good.

I’ve watched talented people go through so many rounds of feedback that they stopped trying to solve the problem and started trying to avoid the next round of criticism.

I’ve probably contributed to that too.

That’s the uncomfortable part of writing this. I’m not standing outside the problem and pointing at it. I’ve been the leader giving another note. I’ve complicated work because I wanted it to be better. I’ve asked teams to move faster while continuing to change what we were asking them to make.

I know how easily good intentions become friction.

I also know one person can’t do everything. That’s not the point of Banks.

There are specialists who know far more than I do about nearly every individual part of marketing. I’ve worked with brilliant agencies, designers, writers, media buyers, product marketers and operators. And I still plan to. Good marketing usually requires several different kinds of expertise.

But expertise alone doesn’t make the pieces work together.

A person can optimize the campaign without questioning the offer, create beautiful work without understanding the sales conversation or write a smart strategy without knowing what the team can realistically ship.

You can do almost anything in marketing.

You can’t do all of it well, all at once, without deciding what actually matters.

I kept finding myself in the space between those decisions and the work.

My career has always been difficult to summarize cleanly. I’ve led teams and owned growth. I’ve worked on brand, positioning, paid media, websites, campaigns, content and sales materials. I can spend the morning talking through P&L and the afternoon opening a design file.

Depending on the person listening, that could sound useful or unfocused.

I often worried it was the second one.

“Jack of all trades, master of none” followed me around for years. I’d meet someone who had spent their entire career becoming exceptional at one discipline and wonder whether my range was just another way of saying I’d never gone deep enough.

I watched people explain what they did in one confident sentence. My answer always seemed to need a paragraph.

Even now, when someone asks exactly what kind of marketer I am, part of me worries I’m about to sound like someone who doesn’t know how to answer. But the confusing part was that the work kept telling me something different.

The difficult, unclear projects kept finding me. I kept seeing the connection between the message and the campaign, the strategy and the landing page, the business goal and the thing someone actually needed to make.

And I loved it.

I really loved it.

Not every day or every project. Plenty of marketing work is tedious, frustrating and far less interesting than we make it sound online.

But I loved being close enough to see an unclear idea become clear. Helping a team get unstuck felt meaningful. So did taking something that existed mostly in conversation and turning it into something another person could see, click, understand or respond to.

Eventually, I had to consider that the thing I’d been treating like a weakness might be the actual value.

Maybe I wasn’t failing to choose between strategy and execution.

Maybe the connection between them was the work.

That’s the idea behind Banks.

It isn’t a large agency, a consultancy that leaves behind a deck or a pair of hands waiting to be told exactly what to produce.

Banks is meant to sit closer to the problem than that.

A company might need help deciding what to do. Or it might know what to do but can’t get it out the door. Usually, the reality is somewhere in between.

The strategy is half formed. Priorities keep moving. The team is capable but stretched. The founder has a strong instinct but can’t yet articulate it. Sales needs something yesterday. The campaign needs a concept. The website no longer reflects what the company has become.

That’s the mess I understand.

Starting a business around it still scared me.

It still scares me.

I wish I could say I launched Banks with total conviction and a five-year vision that made the decision feel inevitable.

I didn’t.

I had self-doubt. I wondered whether people would understand the model. I worried that leaving the more recognizable career path would make me look less successful, even if it made me feel more like myself.

The timing worried me too.

I’m starting a business built around marketing, strategy and creative work while AI is changing all three faster than any of us can comfortably process.

Some of the things I spent years learning can now be approximated in seconds. That’s exciting. It’s also unsettling.

I look at what these tools can produce and wonder which parts of my experience will matter in a few years. On some days, building a service business in this moment feels brave. On others, it feels deeply irresponsible.

I don’t think AI makes this kind of work irrelevant.

But I also don’t want to hide behind an easy answer about how human creativity will always win. The truth is more complicated. Some work will disappear. Some will become cheaper. Skills that once created separation will become widely available.

More people will be able to produce something that looks like marketing. That makes it even more important to know what’s worth making.

Tools can produce options, help us move faster and make a bad idea look finished.

They can’t remove the need to understand the business, the customer, the context and the tradeoffs. They don’t automatically give a team the courage to choose one direction and leave five others behind.

At least, that’s what I believe.

I’m building Banks partly to find out whether I’m right.

The name, Banks, is my son’s.

Becoming his dad changed the way I look at all of this. It didn’t make me less ambitious. In some ways, it made me more ambitious. There’s more at stake now. I want to build something stable, create opportunities for our family and make him proud of me someday.

But I also have a different understanding of what work can take from you when you let it.

There have been moments when he wanted my attention and I was looking at my laptop, finishing one last revision or answering one more message. The thing felt urgent at the time. Most of those things are already difficult to remember.

I'm not trying to romanticize balance because, honestly, I'm not good at it. Starting a business isn’t the obvious way to create a calmer life, and naming it after your child doesn’t magically make every decision noble.

But his name keeps the reason close.

I’m building this for him and for our family.

Financially, yes. But really for more than that.

I want to build a way of working that I’d be proud for him to see. One where caring about your work doesn’t mean giving it every part of you, and where leadership doesn’t have to mean becoming detached from the craft.

Most of all, I want him to see that progress doesn’t always mean moving upward. Sometimes it means moving closer to the parts that make you feel useful and alive.

I don’t have Banks figured out.

The site is live. The idea is real. But I’m still working through what it should become and what I’m willing to let it become.

That uncertainty is uncomfortable for me. I’m used to being the person who helps create the plan.

Now I’m inside something that can’t be fully planned. Not yet, at least.

What I know is that I want to make good marketing work easier to get out of people’s heads, through their companies and into the world.

The people making the work should understand why it matters.

And the people guiding it should remember what it takes to make.

That’s why I built Banks.

Or at least, it’s the most honest answer I have right now.