Well, well, well, hello there. Let’s skip the introductions! If you’re here, we’ve probably already said our “hellos,” and if not, Rookie is doing a wonderful job holding the logo together in the header. Formalities aside, by the end of this article, I want you to have the answers to two questions:
1 - “What can this guy really do?”
2 - “Why the hell should I hire this guy?”
You’re about to meet some friends of mine in the form of a case study. Consider this the ingredients label for the visual feast ahead.
The following are several real projects for a real client, at a real agency, that I created to build one beautiful flywheel still running today. Most case studies show you the floor model, all shiny and hand-waxed. Today, we’re going to the factory floor to see what makes this engine tick. Fair warning: I would love to talk for an hour about every piece of this. I’ll stick to the highlights.
The Short Version
Low on time? Here’s the whole project in less time than it takes to reheat your coffee.
A metal coating manufacturer came to us looking for a run-of-the-mill email journey to end the year on a high note. Instead of “just another cold send,” I turned that opportunity into a user experience study that built an automated sales flywheel, expert content that positioned them as the go-to authority in their field, and an activation campaign that ran from their anniversary to trade shows and beyond.
The Results:
13% Over the Company Revenue Goal
74 Net Promoter Score
3x Larger Minimum Orders YoY
1 to 2 Sales Touches per Account, Down from Chasing Every One by Hand
The Hats I Wore:
UX Researcher: Interviewed the client and their staff, uncovered their pain points, and mapped them out to reverse-engineer solutions.
Creative Director: Set the visual tone and developed the brand standards used across the website and social, while guiding developers and designers.
Copywriter: Wrote the scripts for automated email journeys, trained LLMs, and automated backend variable datasets for toolkits.
Photographer: Shot the shop floor, coatings, and sales team, then retouched everything in-house.
UI Designer: Mapped the customer journey in FigJam, laid out the website in Figma, exported assets for WordPress, and proofed the live build in Markup.io. Then, after launch, used Hotjar and A/B testing to make sure we beat our goals instead of just meeting them.
Graphic Designer: Designed the logos for the client’s anniversary, the Mold Doctors, and the toolkits.
Social Lead: Built universal social templates and outreach toolkits, and standardized the formatting across every platform.
MarTech Lead: Built the email journeys in Autopilot (now Ortto), the lead scoring in Google Sheets via Zapier, and a custom dashboard that reported everything.
AI Trainer: Wrote the prompts, scripts, and expert content behind the LiveChat bot, and set up the AI agents behind the automated outreach.
Team Lead: Directed designers and developers to hit their deadlines, proofed every piece, and kept the account team and client informed, on track, and under budget.
The Toolbox:
FigJam, Figma, WordPress, Autopilot (now Ortto), Zapier, Google Sheets, LiveChat with a custom LLM, Hotjar, Typeform, Markup.io, Google Slides, LinkedIn, a custom CRM, Photoshop, Lightroom, Illustrator, InDesign, and Google Display Ads for PPC and retargeting
Jump Around:
The Brief · The Big Idea · Step by Step · How I Led It · The Results · Beyond This Project
The Brief
Our lovely client has been coating molds, dies, and tooling since the late ’70s. They’re a family-run business with a proprietary mold coating that’s “to-die” for… and a sales team that was absolutely overwhelmed. Quote requests piled up every month, and the reps were chasing every single account by hand. To top it all off, once a customer shipped in a mold, they heard nothing until it came back. The product was top-tier, but the experience often left customers frustrated and in the dark.
But that’s where this story gets exciting! I can smell a creative challenge a mile away.
The Insight: Customers Don’t Want a Sales Pitch. They Want a Status.
If you start with an answer, you’re doomed to fail. I start by listening. Before I open a program, draw a sketch, or assemble a team, I want to find the root cause. So I toured the plant with the sales team and asked everyone the same five questions: sales, shipping, coaters, blasters, even the receptionists. No role is too small.
1. Walk me through what happens when an order reaches you. What do you do, how do you do it, and why is each step necessary?
“We inspect the parts, review what the customer needs, and determine the right coating process. Then we prepare the surface, apply the coating, finish the part, inspect it, and ship it back. Every step matters because the coating has to perform under the customer’s specific operating conditions. If we don’t have the right information upfront, it can create problems later.”
2. Think of three routine jobs that didn’t go as planned because of an avoidable mistake. What went wrong, and what could have prevented it?
“One customer sent parts without explaining their operating conditions, so we had to stop and clarify the requirements. Another sent parts in worse condition than expected, which delayed production. A third waited until their coating completely failed before sending parts back, causing unnecessary downtime. Better intake information, clearer expectations, and maintenance reminders could have prevented those issues.”
3. What five pieces of information would make your job easier or more efficient? Why do they matter, and how could we capture them consistently?
“I’d want to know what the part does, the conditions it operates under, what coating it previously received, how long it’s been in service, and when the customer needs it back. Those five things would help us recommend the right process, anticipate problems, and plan production. We could collect them through a standardized order form and maintain a history for returning customers.”
4. What information do customers regularly misunderstand or fail to provide? How does that affect your work, and what could we communicate earlier to prevent it?
“Customers don’t always understand how much their operating conditions affect coating performance. Some think a coating will last indefinitely, while others don’t know what signs of wear to look for. We spend time explaining things that could have been communicated before the order. Better educational materials and application-specific maintenance guidance would make everyone’s job easier.”
5. Once a job leaves your hands, what should happen next? What does the customer need to know about maintenance, product lifespan, or when it’s time to come back?
“Right now, we finish the job, ship it, and usually don’t hear from the customer until they need something else. But we know these coatings have different lifespans depending on how they’re used. If we tracked when parts went back into service, we could send customers maintenance recommendations before something fails. For a heavy-use application with a 90-day service interval, we might start reminding them around day 60 instead of waiting for them to call us.”
That last answer cracked it wide open. It all came down to timing and the health of the product. If we know when a coating will wear out, we know when the customer will need our client again. Our client didn’t need to sell louder. Their customers needed someone to keep an eye on their tools, the way a doctor keeps an eye on a patient. Preventive maintenance. An annual physical for your molds.
And that’s how the big idea was born: the Mold Doctors. The sales reps became doctors for their customers’ tools, complete with a bag of diagnostic tools, written prescriptions, and regular checkups.
I had my camera with me the whole time, too. I shot coatings going on, parts moving through quality control, and the sales team in the heat of the action, then retouched and edited everything in Photoshop and Lightroom. Those photos carried the entire campaign. Every core image was the client’s real product and real people.
Bringing It to Life, Step by Step
Ten steps, one idea. Here’s how the Mold Doctors went from a hunch on the shop floor to a system that’s still running today.
Step 1: Map the Whole Journey, Shop Floor to Inbox
Let’s start with the part nobody puts in a portfolio. Before any of the fun stuff could work, the data had to line up. I sat down with sales and shipping and traced the path a mold takes from the minute it arrives to the minute it ships back out. Then I mapped the whole journey in FigJam.
Every stage on the shop floor got a matching stage in the CRM and in our marketing, so the shop, the sales team, and the software finally spoke the same language. That’s what let us tie a purchase order straight to a customer’s lead score, and everything else in this story sits on top of it.
Step 2: Pack the Doctor’s Bag
Every good doctor carries a bag, and ours was the new website. I designed the UI in Figma, mobile first, and worked side by side with our developers to build it in WordPress. Two tools did the heavy lifting:
Coatings Comparison Tool: The client’s coatings used to live in a wall of jargon and spec sheets. I turned that into simple side-by-side dropdowns. Pick your metal and temperature, then compare pros, cons, and star ratings to see how each coating would hold up on the material you care about most. No chemistry degree required.
Cycle Savings Calculator: It showed, in real dollars, how many more production cycles you’d squeeze out of a mold by keeping its coating maintained. It turned “you should really recoat that” into “here’s what it’s worth to you.”
Step 3: Write the Prescription
Bag packed, the Mold Doctors were ready to make their rounds.
At Trade Shows: I designed the booths and handouts in Illustrator and InDesign, so the doctors had something great to stand in front of. A Mold Doctor would walk you through the calculator, plug in your numbers with you, and write you a prescription. It landed in your inbox as an automated email showing exactly how much you’d save by following doctor’s orders.
On House Calls: Because the site was mobile first, a rep visiting a customer could hand over the phone and fill out the form together. With the customer’s consent, that placed a cookie on the right phone. No guessing who the lead was. We were standing right next to them.
Every one of those moments fed the customer’s lead score. And when the client hit a milestone anniversary, I branded that, too, and folded it right into the campaign.
Step 4: Take the Doctors Social
A doctor nobody’s heard of doesn’t get many patients. So we took the Mold Doctors social, using the same shop photography and expert content that powered everything else.
LinkedIn was the big one, since that’s where B2B buyers do their homework. I wrote outreach scripts for each Mold Doctor in their own voice, so every message read like a note from a real expert, not a sales blast. Then we put AI agents to work automating the outreach, so the doctors could start conversations with far more people than they could ever reach by hand.
Step 5: Staff the Front Desk Around the Clock
Every practice needs a front desk, and ours never closed. I set up a chatbot on LiveChat, connected it to a large language model, and trained it myself. I wrote the prompts, the conversation scripts, and the expert content it pulled from, with a content writer backing me up on the general articles.
The bot handled the cold and self-sufficient customers, which freed up the reps for the people who actually needed a human. And that expert content didn’t stay in the bot. I spread it across the whole site, where it helped the client rank in Google and show up in AI answers (SEO and AEO), and worked it into every email, so each one had something worth reading.
Step 6: Keep the Patient Posted
Remember the customer who shipped in a mold and heard nothing? Not anymore. I gave them a pizza tracker, just like the one you know from Domino’s. In Autopilot (now Ortto), every stage in the shop triggered an email:
Your mold made it to us, and we’re getting started.
It’s been stripped down and moved to stage two.
It’s in quality control.
It’s shipped, out for delivery, and delivered.
The status update was only the top half. The lower third of every email was expert content: who our client is, why they do what they do, how your coating works, and how to take care of it. Customers were learning from the Mold Doctors without a single sales call.
After delivery, a quick Typeform survey asked how we did. Feedback that used to take days came back in minutes. And when something went wrong (it happens in every business), we heard about it fast, fixed it, and kept fine-tuning the timing of every email.
Step 7: Book the Next Checkup
This is the part I’m proudest of. If a coating is good for about 300 days, we know when that customer will need us again. So the second a part was delivered, a countdown started, adjusted for how many days that customer’s shop actually runs:
90 days left: the first true expert email, like a blog post on mold maintenance, to warm things back up
60 days left: a nudge to run the Cycle Savings Calculator
10 to 15 days left: an article about their specific coating, and why a fresh one pays for itself
1 to 2 days left: their own calculated savings, because waiting means leaving money on the table
Then, finally: a salesperson
The sales team used to make every one of those touches by hand. Now they made one or two, and a lot of the time, zero, because the customer had already reordered. Nobody felt sold to, and that was the whole point.
Step 8: Know Who’s Ready, and Spend Accordingly
I built the lead-scoring formulas in Google Sheets, so the client could read the logic and tweak it themselves. No black box. Then I used Zapier to move the score based on what people actually did: opening an email, running the calculator, getting a prescription, placing an order.
Those scores drove our PPC retargeting, so the ad budget went to people who were already leaning in, not to everyone with a pulse.
Step 9: Test Everything, Then Make It Better
Then we launched, and the real fun started. After go-live, I A/B tested everything and used Hotjar to watch how real visitors moved through each version of the site and the tools. We kept what worked and fixed what didn’t. Between Hotjar on the site and Typeform after every order, we always knew what to improve next.
Step 10: Report Back Every Quarter
Once the client had a proper CRM tying everything together, I built a dashboard to track the results. Every quarter, Zapier pulled the stats into a report deck, and we walked the client through it: what moved, what didn’t, and what we wanted to try next.
Nobody had to dig through a pile of platforms to find out if the work was working. The client and our team looked at the same numbers, and everyone stayed in the loop.
How I Led It
As the creative lead, my job was to protect the idea and keep everyone pointed at it. I came up with the concept, pitched it, and built the foundation myself: the journey, the templates, and the first email in each series. Then I handed it off and art-directed. The team would build the next three emails, and I’d come back in and push each one until it sang.
Every piece got proofed in Markup.io, with feedback pinned right on the work, so nothing slipped through the cracks. I partnered with the account managers to keep us on time and on budget, with the developers to get the site and tools built, and with the client from the first shop-floor interview to the final presentation (and every quarterly report after that).
At the agency, I led a team of as many as 10 designers and developers. My style is simple: set a clear direction, give people room to do great work, and hold the bar high.
The Results
This took months to build. The payoff was humongous.
13% over the revenue goal
74 Net Promoter Score
3x bigger minimum orders, year over year
1 to 2 sales touches per account, down from chasing every one by hand
Three times bigger minimum orders. That’s insane, and it still gets me.
Put it all together (the idea, the expert content, the automation, and the scoring) and you get an evergreen flywheel that keeps spinning on its own. The software handles the menial stuff, so the humans get to do the human side of the work. That’s the balance I’m always chasing.
Beyond This Project: More of What I Bring
That’s one project. There’s a lot more where that came from:
Led 10 remote designers and developers across 8 B2B accounts at the same time, approving work through launch with Agile sprint reviews.
Led development of an AI-powered proposal tool that lets account managers build branded decks in minutes.
Designed 225 custom logos and built selected ones into full brand systems.
Created 30+ Snapchat geofilter illustrations with more than 95 million unique interactions, and was named a Snapchat Featured Cities Artist in 2020, 2021, and 2025.
Directed the identity, packaging, and social creative for a consumer brand’s e-commerce relaunch at Symboliq Media, delivering 138% more traffic, a 38% sales increase, and 87% fewer support inquiries.
Led UX quality checks on a 9,000+ page e-commerce site before launch.
Helped launch Business as “Un”usual, a B2B livestream still running six years later.
Earned my agency’s Employee of the Year award, 2021 to 2025.
My toolbox runs from Adobe Creative Cloud (Photoshop all the way to Premiere Pro and After Effects), Figma, and FigJam to HubSpot, Google Analytics 4, Google Ads, and Zapier, plus AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Midjourney.
If You’ve Got a Creative Challenge, I Want to Be the One Who Cracks It
So, back to those two questions from the top.
What can this guy really do? Listen first, find the idea hiding inside the problem, design it, build the machine behind it, and lead the team all the way through launch. Then keep making it better long after.
Why the hell should you hire him? Because I thrive on messy problems, and I can do this for your team, too. Let’s talk.
