What motivates you when things get tough? Please be detailed and explain why.
The question I always come back to when things get hard is a simple one. Is this hard because it’s wrong, or is it hard because it’s new? Most of the time, discomfort in business isn’t a stop sign. It’s a signal that you’re doing something that hasn’t been done inside that business before.
I remember running a paid advertising campaign at Equipment Leasing Canada that looked like a disaster on paper. The cost per lead was high, the volume was low, and the pressure to pull the budget was real.
But instead of shutting it down, I went further into the numbers and found that the leads coming through were actually converting better than anything we had seen before. The campaign wasn’t failing. It was pointing at the thing we most needed to fix.
How is AI changing your business? What changes are you making to adapt?
AI didn’t walk into our business and fix everything overnight. It did something more uncomfortable than that. It showed us exactly where we were doing things manually that we had no business doing manually anymore. The biggest shift has been in how we handle lead follow-up through AI-powered CRM automation.
Before, we relied on someone remembering to send the right email to the right person at the right time. Now that process runs automatically and nothing falls through the cracks. On the content side, AI tools help me identify what our customers are actually searching for online so our SEO content is built around real behavior instead of gut instinct.
AI hasn’t replaced the thinking. It’s replaced the grunt work that was slowing the thinking down.
If AI is impacting your business, please tell us 3 things you expect to change in the near future.
The first thing I’m watching is lead scoring. Right now there’s still a human judgment call involved in figuring out how ready a lead actually is to move forward. AI is going to get very good at predicting that based on behavior patterns and when it does, our team stops wasting time on the wrong conversations.
The second is ad targeting precision. I expect AI to get us to a place where we’re reaching the exact business owner who needs equipment financing at the exact moment they’re ready to act.
The third is real-time reporting across all our marketing channels. When you can see what’s working instantly, you stop bleeding budget on what isn’t working weeks before you normally would have caught it.
What are your greatest 3 skills and how have they helped you succeed?
The first skill is reading data without losing the human side of it. Most marketers look at numbers and see performance. I look at numbers and see behavior and that difference has saved us from pulling the plug on things that just needed more time.
The second is systems thinking. When I came into Equipment Leasing Canada, customer acquisition was almost entirely referral-based so I built an end-to-end system connecting ads, landing pages, CRM and automated email follow-up.
The third skill is translating complexity into plain language. Equipment financing can feel intimidating to a lot of business owners and there’s a lot of jargon that gets in the way of a good decision. I’ve always been good at taking something complicated and making it feel manageable.
Trust is the real product in this industry and you can’t build trust with language people don’t understand.
Tell us about a time where you saw a surprising outcome that you did not expect.
We ran a paid advertising campaign at Equipment Leasing Canada that looked like a total failure for the first six weeks. The cost per lead was higher than we wanted, the volume was low, and the pressure to shut it down was coming from every direction. But I had a rule I kept coming back to. Never kill a campaign on emotion. Kill it on data.
So I went further into the numbers and found that the leads coming through were converting at a higher rate than our referral leads had been for years.
The campaign wasn’t broken. Our follow-up system was broken. We paused, built a proper CRM workflow, relaunched eight weeks later and within three months our cost per acquisition had dropped by almost half. The campaign didn’t fail. It told us the truth about our business.
What is the biggest challenge you face each day and how do you handle it?
The biggest challenge I face every day is the gap between what the data is telling me and what people around me are feeling in the moment. Feelings move faster than data and when a campaign is three weeks in and the leads aren’t pouring in yet, the gut reaction is always to pull it and try something else. That tension is something I deal with constantly.
The way I handle it is by setting expectations before a campaign ever launches. I sit down with everyone involved and we agree on what success looks like at 30, 60 and 90 days so we’re making decisions based on what we agreed to measure, not how we feel in week three.
I also keep a short list of the two or three numbers that actually tell me if a campaign is healthy. Coming back to those numbers instead of the noise is the thing that keeps our marketing moving forward.
What is a habit you try to stick to and how has it helped you?
The one habit I protect more than anything else is my weekly marketing review. Every single week, no exceptions, I sit down and look at the numbers across every active campaign we’re running.
Most people look at their numbers to confirm that things are working. I look at mine specifically to find where something is quietly breaking down before it becomes a real problem.
That habit has helped me in two concrete ways. The first is that it’s saved us money by catching broken landing pages or targeting issues early before we’ve wasted the budget.
The second is that it’s made me a much better decision maker over time because when you review the same metrics every week for months and years, you develop a feel for what normal looks like. The moment something drifts outside of normal, you feel it before the numbers even tell you.
How do you celebrate your victories?
I’m probably not the best person to ask about celebrating because my natural instinct when something goes well is to immediately start asking why it worked. But I’ve had to train myself to slow down and actually mark the moment.
The first thing I do when a campaign hits its targets is take the team through exactly what happened so everyone understands why the win occurred and we can repeat it. Locking in the lesson before the excitement fades is the most underrated part of celebrating a win.
The second part is a lot more personal. I’ll take a real night off, no checking the dashboard, no thinking about what’s next, just a good meal and a full mental reset.
Marketing is a long game and you can’t run at full speed every day without burning out and making sloppy decisions.
So for me, celebrating looks like two things. Understanding the win well enough to repeat it and then genuinely letting yourself enjoy it before you move on.
Teach our readers something specific to your business. What would that be?
The one thing I wish more business owners understood is the difference between a lead and a qualified lead. Here is what I mean by that. Most businesses optimize for the first number when they should be obsessing over the second one.
In equipment financing, a qualified lead is someone who fits what you do, has a real need for it right now and has the ability to move forward.
Before you spend a single dollar on advertising, get clear on exactly who your qualified lead is. Know what their business looks like, what problem they’re trying to solve and what’s been stopping them from solving it. Then build everything around reaching that specific person.
Your cost per lead might go up at first because fewer people click but your cost per acquisition goes down because the people who do click are far more likely to become customers. Stop chasing leads and start attracting the right ones.
What advice would you give to your younger self and why?
I’d tell myself to stop waiting until the plan was perfect before doing anything with it. I used to spend weeks mapping every detail of a campaign strategy and by the time I launched anything, I had lost weeks of real data I could have been learning from.
The market doesn’t care about your plan. It only responds to what you actually put in front of it.
Launch the imperfect version, set a budget you can afford to learn from, watch what happens, then fix the one thing that’s most clearly broken and run it again.
You learn faster, you build confidence from real results and the version you end up with after three rounds of real feedback is always better than the version you would have launched if you had waited six more weeks to get it right.
Done is better than perfect, not because perfect doesn’t matter, but because done is the only thing that actually teaches you anything.
Are you willing to be a mentor? If yes, what is the best way to reach you?
Yes, absolutely, and I take it seriously because I know how much of a difference it makes to have someone in your corner who has already made the mistakes you’re about to make. Much of what I know came from figuring things out the hard way so if I can shortcut that process for someone else, I genuinely want to do that.
The people I connect with best are business owners and marketers who are trying to move away from referral-dependent pipelines and build something more predictable.
I’m also drawn to people who are willing to look at data honestly, not just when it confirms what they hoped for but especially when it doesn’t. The best way to reach me is through Equipment Leasing Canada where our team can get the conversation started.
My time is limited and I want to be genuinely useful to the people I connect with but if the fit is right, I’m happy to talk.
Just for fun, what is your favorite food?
It’s butter chicken. There’s something about a good butter chicken that just hits differently after a long week. It’s the kind of meal where you don’t need to think. You just sit down, eat and everything slows down for a bit.