How Did I Get Here?

People ask me that sometimes. How did someone who started as a film director end up running studio operations for a global commerce brand? How did a production company founder end up doing EVP-level marketing strategy? How did any of it connect?

The honest answer: it connected because I made it connect. None of it was planned the way it looks in retrospect.

The Beginning: Learning to Run a Shoot

I started at Tampa Digital Studios, and I started learning. Not in a classroom sense. I learned on the floor. A hundred campaigns in seven years, clients like Dell, Purina, Transitions, and 3M, multiple Telly Awards and National Addys, over $3.5 million in production revenue. I was directing. I was producing. I was figuring out the business.

The most important thing I learned there wasn’t technical. It was that the people running the shoot matter more than almost anything else. A crew that trusts each other executes differently than one that doesn’t. I started cutting production time by fixing the team structure, not by pushing people harder.

The HSN Chapter: Learning to Work at Scale

When I moved to HSN, I went from a boutique production company into an operation running 40+ campaigns a year across fashion, culinary, tech, and lifestyle. Live television retail doesn’t give you six weeks of pre-production. It gives you airtime that’s already booked.

That constraint forces a kind of discipline that you can’t learn in a slower environment. You make decisions fast. You execute without the safety net of revision rounds. One run of segments I produced lifted product sales 25%. That number came from doing the work right under pressure, not from having unlimited time to get it perfect.

I also got to run cause-marketing work for HSN Cares, Habitat for Humanity, and UNICEF. Not everything has to sell something to matter. That part stuck with me.

Building Something: Kestum Bilt

I left HSN to start Kestum Bilt. I had no template for what I was building. Just a clear sense of what good production looked like and a belief that I could build a company around it.

Zero to $1 million-plus a year. 66% client retention in a business where most people don’t keep a client past one campaign. The Seiko/Jimmie Johnson production: 80+ crew across five jurisdictions. Thirty-plus projects in the Hispanic market. I grew into a Head of Production role by just doing the work at that level repeatedly.

The hardest part of building a company isn’t the work. It’s building the judgment to know when to say yes to a big project and when you’re not set up to deliver it. I got that wrong sometimes. I learned from it.

What I Do Now

I’m EVP of Marketing and Studio Operations at Shear Enterprises, running the marketing and content strategy for Rhonda Shear Intimates and overseeing Shear Media Studios, the 11,000 square foot multi-studio facility I helped design and stand up from scratch.

I also still run PG2, my independent practice, for client work and studio design projects that come through my own network.

The line from Tampa Digital to here isn’t straight. But every turn taught me something that the next role needed. You don’t always know that in the moment. You figure it out when someone asks you how you got here, and you actually try to answer the question honestly.

That’s how I got here.