About

How I got here

For twenty years I built marketing programs inside other people’s companies. Revaro Group is what happened when I decided to build them from the outside instead.

I started in 2004 at RealAge, a health and wellness company later acquired by Hearst. Nine years there and through the Sharecare acquisition took me from individual contributor to Executive Director of Marketing, running acquisition and lifecycle programs behind a $30M+ annual online revenue stream. My first years owning acquisition took the customer database from 2M to 10M. By the end it was past 12M.

During that stretch I worked with Tim Ash and SiteTuners on a multivariate testing program for the RealAge registration experience, evaluating more than 550,000 design combinations. The engagement ran as a case study in Ash’s book Landing Page Optimization, which reported a 40% lift in conversion rate. It’s also where I stopped trusting redesigns and started trusting tests.

From 2013 to 2018 I led Marketing Operations and lifecycle execution at Intuit, across a 55M-customer database supporting TurboTax and a $500M+ annual revenue stream. I managed and developed a team of eight campaign managers and marketing operations leaders. Working with Product and Analytics, I led a cross-functional team that revamped the TurboTax subscription program and generated $40M+ in incremental revenue, and we rebuilt deliverability practice to lift inbox placement from roughly 75% to 98%+.

After Intuit came Vice President and Data Marketing Technology Partner at MUFG Union Bank, then acquisition at ActiveCampaign and growth at Wagepoint, a Canadian payroll SaaS company, where I led the marketing team and sat on the leadership team. Since 2024 I’ve been independent.

Developing marketers is half the job

Twenty years in-house means twenty years of hiring, managing and coaching people, not only running programs. I’ve built and reorganized marketing teams at Intuit, MUFG Union Bank, ActiveCampaign and Wagepoint, and served as Executive Sponsor of the Latin/Hispanic Employee Resource Group at ActiveCampaign. I’ve spoken on email deliverability at Oracle’s Modern Marketing Experience, and I’m a former program advisor for UCI’s Customer Experience Certificate Program. I also hold an MBA with a concentration in Finance, which mostly shows up as an unwillingness to present a marketing plan that can’t survive a conversation with the CFO.

The pattern I kept running into is the same one everywhere: marketers who are excellent at execution and stuck there. Being strategic isn’t a personality trait you either have or don’t have. It’s a purposeful process: where you point your attention, what you’re willing to stop doing, and how you make the argument to the people holding the budget. I teach it as a workshop, and I’ve written the small business version of it over at Thryve Digest.

The other pattern is positioning. Product marketing is the connective function between product, engineering, sales and support, and in most growing companies nobody owns it. What follows is predictable: the product gets described one way on the website, another way in the deal, and a third way once the customer is onboarded. Nobody’s wrong, exactly. They just never agreed. I teach that as a workshop too, and I do it as engagement work.

Twenty years as the client

I’ve been the client for dozens of agencies. That’s a useful seat to have sat in, because you learn quickly which ones showed up with a process and which ones showed up with a template.

The bad version is familiar enough. The client is expected to fit the agency’s box. Same audit, same deck with a different logo on the cover, same recommendations that could have been written before the kickoff call happened. Nobody sets out to work that way. It happens because learning a business properly is slow, and slow is unbillable.

The good ones exist, and I’ve worked with several. What separated them wasn’t talent. It’s that they knew the business well enough to argue with me about it.

So that’s the bar I hold myself to. I read your numbers and your programs before I open my mouth, and the scope gets written for your situation rather than adapted from the last one.

Revaro Group is one person

That seems worth saying on the About page rather than letting you find it out on a call. There’s no team page here because there isn’t a team. If you hire me, the person who answers your email is the person doing the work, and nothing quietly gets handed to a junior on a Friday afternoon.

Some companies need an agency with a bench, a project manager, and somebody to call when I’m on a plane. If that’s you, go hire one. I’d rather put that here than discover it with you three weeks into a bad fit.

What twenty years in-house actually buys you is a filter. I know which marketing advice survives contact with a real budget and a skeptical finance team, and which advice only ever worked in the case study it came from. A good share of what I do now is help companies stop paying for the second kind. It also means the range is real rather than claimed. Consumer subscriptions and B2B software, regulated and unregulated, B2C and B2B. The mechanics mostly travel.

I also publish Thryve Digest

Thryve Digest is a small business and personal reinvention publication, and it operates under Revaro Group. It started because I kept typing the same advice into client emails and wanted somewhere better to put it. Writing for strangers turns out to be a harder test of an idea than saying it on a call, which has made me more careful about the ideas.