The writer the campaigns pointed at.

I was first paid to write professionally by The Edmonton Journal while I was still at university. In December 2004, I was yanked into this crazy IR business and started work for a firm in my home town of Calgary, writing in-house content about public companies, mostly in the petroleum sector. That was my first taste.

After that, I followed in my father's footsteps directly inside the oil and gas sector, spending three years as a surface landman, driving Alberta farm roads and sitting at kitchen tables with families whose land a company wanted.

Every visit required one crucial outcome: did I come home with signed paperwork? That job taught me how to talk plainly about someone's land and someone's money, how to represent a company carefully, how to make the person across the table feel heard, and still get the deal done. I've been doing some version of that ever since.

I grew up around oil and gas. My father was a mineral landman, and it was the first sector I wrote about professionally. After chasing a dream to publish a book, I moved to Vancouver at the end of 2007 and joined another investor relations firm in early 2008, just before the market fell apart. The crash forced me to broaden out. Mining came next, then biotech, technology, consumer goods, defense, and whatever else landed on my desk. Around 2015, my byline disappeared on purpose. I took a year off to chase another dream and produced a television series that ran for 40 episodes and aired in several countries.

Over the years, more than 400 public companies have paid for some form of my writing, often without my name appearing anywhere. The marketing firms sold the campaigns. I wrote every word of what the campaigns pointed at.

From inside, I saw what the CEOs paying for it all never got to see. They asked for metrics and got anecdotes. They were told the “secret sauce” couldn't be explained.

Here's the whole secret: quality content and effective distribution. Both have to work. I write the first, and I can connect you to the second, with receipts.

For years I believed the articles mattered most, because the articles were what I was paid to make. I was wrong. The page the traffic lands on is what matters the most. Hands down.

So that's what I build now. A page the company owns, on its own domain, which means the company owns the data too. Instead of guessing, now each client knows which angle resonates, and which doesn't. And the ones that work? They get more budget thrown at them.

What am I looking for when a CEO hands me his story? Honest answer, I don't know until I see it. It finds me. I catch it and I run with it. What I do know is where CEOs go wrong. They know too much about their own company. Geologists assume everyone cares about formations. Researchers assume everyone knows how to read the results of clinical trials. Finance guys assume everyone will fall for the old lipstick-on-a-pig trick. My job is to find the part any normal person can understand and remember, because a confused reader clicks away. I make the copy digestible enough that readers feel smart for understanding it, but not so dumbed down that they feel insulted by being spoon-fed.

One example. A client was pulling lithium out of oilfield wastewater, and nobody could explain it in under a paragraph. I invented a word, “petrolithium”. One word explained the whole process. They liked it enough to buy petrolithium.com from me for a few grand.

I won't lie or deceive. I won't take stock as payment. I won't make price promises. I won't use information that isn't public, and I won't sign off on anything built to slide past a regulator. My reputation is worth more to me than any retainer or gig could ever cover.

I live in rural Paraguay because I can. I can do the work from anywhere, so I chose good land, my family, my faith, a useful time zone, and a long way from the noise. Agencies in New York, Toronto, and Vancouver have always hired writers like me anyway.