The AI person you're thinking about hiring, before you hire one.
Marketing knows what it needs. IT has its own list. I understand both, and I build the piece in between.
Talk to me before you post the job
The panel is ready. The job isn't.
Three places to start
Marketing teams
“We had a tech person set this up. He doesn't know anything about marketing.”
The marketing lead at a small B2B software company, 2025
Attribution without involving IT.
Your ad platforms, your CRM and your finance system each hold a piece of the answer. I connect the three in a database you own, and marketing reads spend against results without waiting in IT's queue.
Growing businesses
“I'm freaking out on all the levels having all of these gaps, but also trying to see this as an opportunity to rethink.”
A marketing leader at a healthcare software company, 2026
An operating rethink without hiring for it.
Slap AI on top of a process nobody has looked at and the process wins. So I look at the work first, then build what the rethink calls for. Sometimes that's fewer people than you planned.
Founders in the Netherlands
“I feel like I'm an IT manager most of the time.”
The founder of a relocation coaching business, 2025
Your tools running without you.
You've automated what you could reach yourself, and now you're the one keeping it all going. I build the rest to run on its own, so you go back to running the business.
Work I've built
| What I built | The number | What it does |
|---|---|---|
Attribution system A global multi-brand B2C company, 2025 | 6 weeks kickoff to executive reporting | Return-on-ad-spend reporting for their executives six weeks after kickoff, on a database they own. Their own analytics team runs it, and it's still in use today. |
Content engine A content operation I run, 2026 | 1 month until drafts passed review untouched | Every correction a reviewer makes becomes a rule for the next draft. Within a month, drafts were going through review untouched, and the model never changed. |
Operational automation A relocation coaching business, 2026 | 2 min from form to draft roadmap | A first draft of every client's roadmap is ready minutes after the intake, so the coaches' time goes to the client, not the copying. |
Why not just hire someone?
You could. A capable generalist with a good AI setup will get you a working first draft of most of this. But most of the job ads for this role ask for senior judgment at a junior salary, and the first draft is the junior part.
What the draft doesn't contain is the part that takes years: how the pieces fit, what to automate and what to leave manual, and how marketing and IT both get what they need. When I'm done, that generalist is who I hand the system to.
How I work
Assess, rethink, build.
Assess
I start at the friction, usually wherever someone is cutting and pasting between two systems.
Rethink
I look at the workflow before the tool, and the tool before the org chart.
Build
What gets built sits beside the software you already run, not inside a vendor's product. And whoever runs it, you own it: your team runs it, or I keep it running so nobody on your team has to be IT. Either way it's documented and nothing is locked to me.
Same rules every time, never the same build.
The first thing I hand you is an assessment: the workflows mapped, the decision logic pulled out of the manual steps, and the handful of things worth automating, with what each would take. Sometimes that assessment is the whole engagement.
Who does the work
I lead every engagement, and I'm the one you talk to. On bigger builds, I bring in data architects and analysts I've worked with for years, so the work scales without changing who's accountable. When a project needs a skill I don't have, like deep marketing automation platform work, I bring in a specialist for that too. You're never handed off; you're added to.
Before this I spent fifteen years in enterprise marketing operations, the person who figures out why the CRM isn't syncing and why the attribution numbers don't match.
I'm an American in Utrecht. All the work is in English, with clients on both sides of the Atlantic.
What that costs you, said out loud. I lead a small number of engagements at a time, because the accountable person doesn't scale even when the team does. Strategy I can't build doesn't get written. Nothing is delivered in Dutch. And because what I build leaves with you, I hold no lock-in, which means you have to want me back rather than need me.
Latest writing
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Among 813 managers, the AI-employee frame cut error-catching 17%, but only where agents were already on the org chart.
Three ways to pay. Only one of them is a decision you own.
How Do You Budget for AI in 2027? Pick the Meter Before the Model.
A metered AI price moves with how you use it and with the calendar, so you cannot budget it by model name.
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