$185M
new business. I built the engine behind it
Case Study · Enterprise Defense Materials · Highly Regulated
The marketing machine behind a U.S. defense manufacturer's recovery.
A 25-year-old American producer of critical raw materials for defense, in one of the most heavily regulated, export-controlled corners of manufacturing. When I joined in Q3 2023, it had a revolving door of executives and a public record dominated by prior-ownership litigation. I rebranded the entire company, built the demand engine and go-to-market strategy nearly tripling revenue, and authored their $50M DoD grant.
The product was never the problem. The market not knowing they existed was. So I built the machine that manufactures demand.
A 25-year-old American producer of critical raw materials for defense. The kind of materials that go into armor, munitions, and aerospace, in a space governed by export controls and federal compliance at every step. Technically dominant. More than 200 employees. Over $100M a year in revenue when I joined in Q3 2023.
Underneath, chaos. Prior ownership had left a stack of litigation behind it. A federal government-contract compliance settlement. An export-control matter that sat with the former owner. Employment suits. Search the company and you found the legal trouble long before you found the products.
The org would not sit still either. Two CEOs and three CFOs cycled through in my time. Triple-digit annual turnover. The commercial motion was running on memory, with no pipeline, no forecast, and no shared number. Most people wait for that kind of noise to clear before they build. I built through it.
They gave me free reign over marketing, and I was the one constant in a company that could not keep a seat filled.
Every week I run strategy with the CEO, the Chief of Staff, and the entire sales team. I own the commercial motion end to end. Direction, demand, message, and enablement, all mine to set and to answer for. In an org cycling through executives and litigation, I held the line and kept the growth compounding.
I rebranded the entire 25-year-old company, unified the whole go-to-market into one system, and wired an AI intelligence layer through it that most marketers cannot build.
A full rebrand of a 25-year-old company, then a multi-brand, multi-domain search strategy built on the new identity. Engineered to rank in Google and to get cited by the AI answer engines technical buyers now query first. Organic growth of more than 2,000%. Buyers started finding the products and the proof, instead of the legal history.
When a company touches a site, I know who they are. Privacy-safe reverse-IP and enrichment surface the account and the people, score them by intent, and map them to history, so a rep sees the whole buyer the moment they open the record.
I go after accounts before they raise a hand. Job postings, defense and procurement activity, industry directories. Automated enrichment pipelines rank in-market accounts by intent and feed account-based marketing, so the team works the right ones first.
The engine feeds qualified demand mapped to the buying committee. I build the team's materials, their data, and their plays, and I sit with them every week to make sure they can close what it feeds them.
Underneath all of it, I also stood up their CRM from zero to full adoption, so sales, finance, and the executives finally worked from one number. The plumbing mattered. The demand is the story.
This is an export-controlled space. Speed is worthless if it leaks. Every layer was built to move fast and still respect the rules a defense supplier cannot break.
That discipline is mine. Most marketers have never had to operate under it. In this world, it is the whole game.
$50M
DoD grant, authored
I personally authored the client's $50M U.S. Department of Defense DPA Title III grant application to expand domestic production of critical defense materials. Same hands, same tenure. I fill the pipeline, and I help fund the capacity that has to serve it.
A nine-figure producer with the best product in its niche, no modern go-to-market, and a search page full of inherited lawsuits is not a marketing problem. It is a systems problem wrapped in noise. You solve it by building one demand machine, wiring governed intelligence into every layer, and holding the line while the org churns around you.
The demand is real. The revenue is real. The AI is real. The grant is real. I built all of it, through the chaos.