Twenty five years in technology and ten years building Cobalt Digital Marketing in the Rio Grande Valley. I have built through the dot com era, the rise of search, the social media boom and now AI. The work has always been the same: put each new wave to work for real businesses instead of chasing it.
956·566·4998
From aircraft electronics to chief technology officer to ten years running my own agency. One long apprenticeship in how systems actually work, applied to marketing that has to keep up with them.
I joined out of high school and worked on F/A-18 Super Hornets, and I spent two of those years studying electrical engineering. 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.
I started my first company at twenty one, straight out of the Navy. 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, because 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.
I started Cobalt in 2016 with Stephanie Hawk and moved home to Brownsville to be closer to family. Ten years on, it is an agency that adopts new technology early and with discipline, which is a different thing from adopting it fast. Every wave since the dot com era has rewarded the same habit: learn the tool properly, find the part of it that genuinely makes the work better, and ignore the rest. I am still the one doing the work.
This is the day job, and it has been for ten years at Cobalt Digital Marketing. Search engine optimization, digital strategy, and an honest read on which new tools matter for your business and which ones are just noise. Driving traffic to a website is the easy half. The real work is turning those clicks into people who walk through your door, and after twenty five years in technology I have almost certainly seen your problem before.
I speak for the Kauffman Foundation, teach as a facilitator for UTRGV, and built the Digital Playbook Workshop, an eight week class where business owners learn to run their own marketing. I learned this work the slow way, and the whole point of teaching is that the people in the room do not have to. If I ever had to give up the rest of the job, this is the part I would keep.
I served on the board of CDCB, first as vice chair and then as chair, working on housing and financial stability for Valley families, and I am president of RGV Dads. Since 2013 I have run the digital side of political campaigns, including Schools Vote, because turnout in local elections decides more than most people think. None of these are titles I went looking for. The Valley gave me a career, so putting the same skills to work for it is the least I can do.
A good part of what I am proudest of has happened outside the agency. I served on the board of CDCB, first as vice chair and then as chair, where the work was housing and financial stability for families across the Rio Grande Valley, and I am president of RGV Dads, a community for fathers here who want to show up better for their kids. Neither of those is a title I went looking for, and both have taught me more about leadership than any job ever has.
Since 2013 I have worked on political campaigns, handling the digital side. It is demanding work against a deadline nobody can move, and it has made me a sharper marketer than any retainer could, because a campaign tells you exactly what worked on one night in November. There is nowhere to hide in that.
I also speak for the Kauffman Foundation and facilitate at UTRGV, usually with people who are earlier in this than I am. That is the part I would keep if I had to give the rest up. The Valley produced me, so handing some of it back is the least I can do.
And I have 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.
