Leadership

The best time to start a new business is at the beginning of the worst economic downturn in the last 100 years—said no one ever.

Except, apparently, me.

A few months before the 2008 global financial crash, I launched my first SEO copywriting business, MeriWords Pty Ltd, from a tiny studio apartment in Melbourne, Australia—armed with nothing but a secondhand Apple laptop, a rambunctious Burmese kitten, and the kind of stubborn optimism that borders on delusion.

While the financial world was literally burning, I built a website from scratch, optimized it to the hilt, and somehow landed a Page One Google ranking for "SEO copywriter Melbourne" in just three short weeks. Then the phone rang—one brave client, another, then a flood.

Within months, my ramen-noodle budget gave way to high-end organic groceries as retainers stacked up faster than the used coffee mugs on my desk. My little brown cat witnessed the birth of an accidental empire—fueled by caffeine, late nights, and the sweet satisfaction of watching conversion rates climb while the economy tanked.

As demand exploded, so did my offering. SEO morphed into AdWords. Then email marketing. Then full-stack digital. I assembled a small, scrappy team of digital misfits who could do it all, and do it fast—people who understood that results matter more than industry buzzwords or fancy pitch decks.

In 2011, I launched Fat Cake Media—a full-service digital agency with a results-first mindset and zero tolerance for marketing nonsense. I was invited to RMIT University to teach the dark arts of SEO copywriting. Corporate and government clients helped grow the agency. But instead of expanding into a bloated agency machine, I kept it nimble and tactical, doubling down on strategy, conversion, and doing what actually works—even when it wasn't the shiny object everyone else was chasing.

From Australia to America — Living the dream.

By 2014, I’d packed up my life, my dog-eared marketing books, and my increasingly entitled little brown cat, and flew us both to San Francisco to launch Fat Cake, Inc. in the U.S. market. It had always been my dream to run my own agency in the US.

The hustle continued, but the mission evolved.

After years running a full-service marketing agency, I discovered what most marketers don't want to admit: getting more traffic to your website is easy. Conversion is the hard part—and that’s where the real money is.

That's why I launched Data Driven CRO—a consultancy built for B2B companies who are done with guesswork and ready to improve their conversion rate.

We don't chase marketing trends. We fix funnels. We transform marketing from a cost center into a growth engine that actually delivers on its promises.

We do this with a simple, logical process that requires zero marketing ‘juju’ and is based on good old-fashioned common sense. We use the industry’s most cutting-edge conversion technologies, led by in-depth human expertise.

Today, I lead the agency from Seattle, just a few blocks from the shores of Puget Sound. I help B2B brands sharpen their digital presence, cut through the noise, and finally get results that stick.

In the long run, organic search still outperforms every other channel (just like I insisted it would back in 2008), and CRO is the lever that turns that traffic into profit.

If you're ready to make your website work as hard as you do, let's talk.

And that tiny Burmese kitten from my Melbourne apartment? She's now 17 years old, still ridiculously healthy, and living her best life chasing butterflies in the Pacific Northwest.

Learn more about my background on my LinkedIn profile.