Navy avionics technician. Lead web architect through Austin’s search boom. Chief technology officer for five years. Now I run Cobalt Digital Marketing from home in the RGV.
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From aircraft electronics to chief technology officer to running my own shop — one long apprenticeship in how systems actually work, pointed at how people actually search.
Diagnosing avionics on a flight line teaches you two things that never stopped being useful: complicated systems are only simple systems stacked carefully, and guessing is not a diagnostic method. I still troubleshoot a stalled website the way I was trained to troubleshoot an aircraft — isolate, test, verify.
My first company. Dozens of websites designed, built, hosted and maintained — the entire stack, by hand, back when doing all of it yourself was just called having a job. Nothing since has been abstract to me, because I have had my hands on every layer of it.
I got to Austin while search engine optimization was still being invented, and joined a shop that was genuinely pioneering it. I was part of the team that took it to a million dollars in revenue in three years. That is where SEO stopped being a tactic to me and became a discipline — equal parts science and art.
I came back to the Valley and brought search engine optimization with me — it essentially was not being practiced here yet. Over five years as CTO the company grew revenue 366% and improved client retention by 90%. I learned what this work does for a business when nobody in the market is doing it.
Everything above, aimed at one thing: getting Valley businesses found by the people already looking for them. I am still the one doing the work, which is the whole reason to hire someone at this stage of a career rather than earlier.
Driving traffic to a website is the easy half. My priority is turning those clicks into people who actually walk through your door. Years across agencies of every size mean I have almost certainly seen your problem before.
Analyzing competitive landscapes, doing the in-depth research, and building campaigns around what customers are actually searching for. It would be a shame for a beautiful new website to go unnoticed.
Keeping a site current, structured and worth reading — so search engines and human beings both find what they came for.
I am an organizer and mentor for Code #RGV Brownsville, and I take every opportunity I get to talk shop with peers and coding students. The Valley produced me; the least I can do is hand some of it back.
I have also been writing about this work since 2013 — search, analytics, entrepreneurship, and lately an honest accounting of what AI is and is not doing to this industry. Not thought leadership. Just notes from someone still doing the work.
