I’ve always believed momentum is earned.
You don’t get it from one lucky break or one viral moment. You get it from showing up.
Quietly…
When nobody’s clapping. You get it from doing the reps when there’s no guarantee they’ll pay off.
That’s what 2025 felt like for me.
Not overnight success. Not dreams magically showing up. More like this:
Years of disciplined work finally started to create lift. Years of figuring out this thing called digital marketing. Years of preaching about the power of channels like Reddit. Years of building relationships. Years of building an audience.
The flywheel didn’t just spin in 2025…
It started pulling.
And the biggest mindset shift I’m carrying forward is simple:
Most limits are self-imposed.
Not in a motivational-poster way. In a practical way. A lot of the ceilings we feel are just us saying, I’m not ready yet.
Or not now. Or I need one more thing before I can do that.
This year, I watched that story fall apart in real time.
Not because things got easier but because I stopped waiting to feel ready.
Dad-first moments are the real highlights
The best parts of my year had nothing to do with business.
One of the most recent moments was watching my kids exchange gifts with each other at Christmas. Not the receiving.
The act of giving.
Seeing them light up because they picked something their sibling would truly love rewires your brain in the best way. My daughter fell in love with knitting this year and her little sister was committed to buying her a knitting kit. The joy on her face watching her open this gift and then say those magic words: “I love it. Thank you!” – It was absolutely priceless..
Going back to Disney World was another highlight. My wife has fallen in love with the magic of Disney and the pace of Italy. This year, we went back to Disney with long time family friends who my kids refer to as Aunt & Uncle. We also brought along the in-laws which was a great life hack for date night at Disney. All in all…
It was a blast.
Standing there during the fireworks, watching my wife & kids smile, watching my youngest in pure awe.. It felt like a snapshot of why we do any of this. Icing on the cake is that it happened to be right around the time the Philadelphia Eagles won the Super Bowl and we happened to catch the MVP parade.
All that said… My favorite family moment this year wasn’t glamorous at all.
Every year I take my girls on a daddy-daughter adventure. Off the grid, tents, marshmallows, nature, no production. Just time together. This year we stayed at an Airbnb that is placed directly on a farm.
And I couldn’t stop thinking: this is what I wish I had more of as a kid. More time outside. More slow moments. More being together with no agenda.
A small dad win that matters a lot to me: my oldest is turning into a real bookworm. She loves reading. She loves math. And I don’t think that happened by accident. I’ve put in a lot of time reading with her, playing with her, staying present. That investment pays dividends in a way no business win ever could.
If I could redo anything at home this year, it’s not some dramatic regret…
BUT… I REALLY wish I’d planned to buy and set up my sauna earlier. Here’s what it looks like:
I’m excited to get my sauna set up because it’s habit with outsized upside for long-term health and recovery. Regular heat exposure supports protein repair through heat shock proteins, improves blood flow by relaxing blood vessels, and helps reduce inflammation and oxidative stress. Over time, it also supports metabolic health, fitness, immune resilience, and cellular cleanup.
I also REALLY wish I’d finished the home studio / office set up earlier. Here’s a mock up of what the studio is going to look like once it’s ready. I hired the folks at Dream Studio to plan and design it. Now I need to make it happen:
These two specific upgrades have the ability to pay me back every single week.
But I’ve pushed them off…
New traditions emerged too:
- summer jogs around the lake with the kids
- concerts with my wife (we went to three this year—and we’re already booking more because it was so much fun)
And one thing I’m genuinely proud of: I got serious about being unplugged after 5.
Supper time is ours. Evenings are ours. I rarely work late unless the kids are already asleep…
That’s the standard.
Because one belief I refuse to compromise on is this:
You can be great at business and be a great dad.
Business: the flywheel actually started pulling
From a business standpoint, 2025 was the shift from me carrying almost everything to building something that can carry weight without breaking…
A few headline outcomes:
- Our monthly run-rate increased 159.18%.
- Against our annual plan, we’re tracking to finish 15% above target.
- We filled all the seats on our Senior Leadership Team for Foundation
- We rolled out profit sharing and redistributed a meaningful slice of success back to the team—and I take that seriously. I love seeing people get paid for great work.
We also closed brands I’m proud of—brands with standards:
- Paychex
- Flourish (Canva)
- Bitly
- Fastly
- BuildXact
- A handful of the top universities in North America
And we earned public validation through reviews on Clutch from brands like Paychex, Strategic Ed, and more.
I don’t take that lightly. Good work should leave a paper trail….
Deepening The Reddit Relationship
One of the most exciting moves this year was collaborating with Reddit in both San Fransisco and NYC for a B2B marketing event. I had the chance to be one of the keynote speakers at their B2B event and share strategies that brands in B2B can leverage to do Reddit Marketing the right way.
The work that our team at Foundation has been doing for clients as a Reddit Marketing Agency has been best in class. The chance to talk about some of that work with industry leaders was a great way to give back to the industry while also exposing brands to what Foundation has to offer. But that’s not all we’ve been doing together…
I’ve had some of my ideas and content featured on Reddit for Business a few times:
And these features helped drive additional buzz around Foundation.
The most important decision I made
Bringing the leadership team to Nashville to run our annual plan. We spent about $14,000 to bring the Senior Leadership team together in Nashville last week for quarterly planning. Here’s what we did:
We spent two days together for quarterly planning diving deep into what’s been done over the last 3 months and planning the next 3. • I found a Cowboy hat on broadway because… Why not?! I didn’t scoop up any boots but the urge was real. The city is absolutely electric. I’d say it’s officially in my top 5 places in the US.
The quarter after was a success and we had zero client churn which is absolutely huge. Shout out to our strategy, creative and AM team. This was an amazing win — Our growth over the last few months has been awesome. We’ve brought on 17+ new logos and have a handful of new Foundationites onboarding to learn our approach, processes and strategies.
That trip was an investment and it paid off.
It wasn’t the only trip that paid off… Going in person to see clients, build relationships and connections paid huge ROI.
It’s not easy living on the East Coast of Canada building a global business… But it definitely gets easier when you’re able to get on a plane every month and build relationships with clients, partners and teammates.
When leadership gets aligned, the company gets calmer. And when it gets calmer, it executes better.
What I stopped doing
The biggest improvement I made this year wasn’t a tactic.
It was letting go of the belief that I had to oversee everything myself.
I brought in leadership to run departments I’d been gripping too tightly. That created space for me and for the team. The business became less dependent on my bandwidth and more dependent on a system that can scale. Our growth has reflected this success and the results have been wild. We had our best month in history back in November. We had two big clients sign in December and one of our longest lasting Organic Reddit clients extend into 2026.
The hard moment (and the boundary)
We intentionally set a boundary with a client who paid well but didn’t show up the right way for our team.
It hurt in the short term. But it protected the culture.
And that’s the company I want to build: high performance, high empathy. Not high performance with tolerance for anything. Not high empathy with no standards. Both.
What I learned the hard way about leadership and culture
One of the most uncomfortable lessons 2025 taught me wasn’t about strategy or growth.
It was about me.
I’ve always cared deeply about culture. We talk about it. We document it. We hire for it. We publish values like “growth-driven,” “high standards,” and “high empathy.” But here’s the truth I had to confront this year:
Culture isn’t what you publish. It’s what you practice.
More specifically—it’s what leadership practices when no one’s watching.
I realized that the way I saw myself as a leader wasn’t always the way the team experienced me. Not because anyone was wrong—but because perception is part of the job. And habits, not intentions, are what actually land.
The patterns we tolerate. The behaviors we model. The conversations we delay.
That becomes the culture.
Not the onboarding deck. Not the values slide. Not the words on the wall.
If a company says it values growth but leaders don’t invest in developing people, the culture isn’t growth:
It’s pressure.
If a company says it values empathy but everyone feels drained, the issue isn’t the team:
It’s leadership habits.
That realization hit hard.
Because it forced me to accept something uncomfortable:
The culture reflects your worst leadership habits, not your best intentions.
Once I realized that, I couldn’t shake it…
So instead of asking, “Why isn’t the culture where we want it to be?”
I started asking, “What am I modeling that’s creating this?”
- Where was I inconsistent?
- Where was I reactive instead of deliberate?
- Where was I avoiding the awkward conversation?
- Where was I starting things but not finishing them?
Teams don’t follow what you say in all-hands.
They follow what you repeat, what you tolerate, and what you prioritize…
So I made a shift.
I stopped trying to declare culture in just our deck and onboarding…
And started investing in ensuring that my own habits matched the culture we wanted to earn.
- More data.
- More clarity.
- More autonomy.
- More delegation.
- More consistency.
- More accountability.
- Fewer reactive moves.
- Earlier hard conversations.
- Not because it feels good—but because it compounds.
This work doesn’t show up in screenshots or celebratory posts….
But it’s the difference between a culture that looks good and one that holds under pressure.
2025 didn’t teach me that leadership is about having all the answers.
It taught me that leadership is all about the above. .
Distribution.ai: building what’s next
A major part of this year wasn’t about squeezing more out of what already worked.
It was about deciding—clearly and deliberately—what needed to exist next, and committing to build it.
Distribution.ai stopped being a side project this year. It became a real bet. That shift showed up in tangible ways. We brought on two engineers and a full-time designer. Not contractors. This year, we crossed the early markers that matter:
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We locked in beta users who weren’t just curious, but invested
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We closed our first enterprise client—real buying committee, real expectations
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We generated monthly recurring revenue, which reframes every conversation
- And we launched a handful of features that are helping us add more value to customers
We now make it easy to place content directly from Distribution.ai into Hubspot:
But the most interesting part wasn’t the wins. Its the various problems that we’re tackling.
Scaling. Prioritization. Churn.
That’s the SaaS game.
Foundation: great moments, real lessons
At Foundation, we went all-in on AI this year.
Not as a trend, not as marketing language, but as capability. As leverage. As a way to fundamentally change how work gets done. And the more time I spend inside the systems, the clearer it becomes: I still haven’t scratched the surface.
We’re living through one of those rare windows where early conviction compounds. Where leaning in—before everything feels obvious—creates an edge that isn’t just technical, but strategic. The gap won’t come from knowing about AI. It will come from building with it, wrestling with its limits, and designing workflows that assume it’s part of the stack—not an add-on.
Distribution.ai is where that belief is being tested in real time. Every release, every user conversation, every constraint forces sharper thinking. Less theory. More execution.
This wasn’t the year of arrival.
It was the year of construction.
And that matters more.
Travel: great moments, real lessons
We traveled a lot this year—family and work.
Highlights included Disney, PEI, Bermuda, San Diego, Amsterdam, New York, Nashville, Austin, Charlotte, and a handful of personal moments that mattered (a high school reunion, a wedding, a night seeing Busta Rhymes).
But I also learned something the hard way:
Some travel simply isn’t worth the cost.
The fast 24-hour runs were hard on my body.
And by the last month of the year, I was traveled out.
So I’m changing the rule:
If I’m leaving my family and moving my body across the map, it needs to earn its place.
Health: solid baseline, work to do
My honest snapshot right now:
- low stress
- high energy
- fitness slipped, but improving
- golf stayed consistent
- yoga didn’t happen as much as I wanted
- running was good until I got injured
Injuries were the biggest blocker this year. When I get hurt, I don’t always restart fast… Especially in winter.
That has to change, because my health isn’t a side project. It’s a key part of the game of life.
The cottage: buying time, not just property
This year my wife & I bought a cottage. As our kids get older, we’re quickly realizing…
There are only so many summers you get with your kids unless you play your cards right.
We wanted a place that creates lasting memories and gives them a chance to fall in love with adventure and the outdoors. A place we can return to year after year. A place where time slows down and we actually get to be together… That’s the point.
Giving: more money than time, more intention
This year I gave more money than time.
This isn’t something I’m proud of but it’s something I’m okay with. I needed a lot of time to go to my family & businesses this past year. I showed up for board meetings & annual plannings.
I wasn’t as involved as I’ve been in past years with nonprofits and organizations, but I still supported groups I care about. One thing I loved was helping my kids use their allowance and time to give. Generosity isn’t taught in lectures—it’s taught in practice.
I also showed up to a few political events—not intensely, but enough to stay connected to what’s happening and who’s building.
The lessons I’m taking forward
A few rules I’m carrying with me:
- You can be as great as you want to be if you’re willing to do the work.
- The only real limits are the ones you self-impose.
- When demand for your time goes up, diligence becomes the job.
- You can’t believe everything you read on the internet—even from people you respect.
- You can build a serious business and be a serious dad.
That last one is non-negotiable for me.
I’m not interested in success that costs you your family.
2026: fewer random moves, more intention
My priorities going into 2026 are clear:
- Take better care of my health
- Help the people I work with do the best work of their career
- Drive growth for Distribution.ai and Foundation
And the boundary is just as clear:
I’m not attending events that don’t serve me.
No more “just because.” No more travel that doesn’t earn its place.
My scoreboard next year will be simple and human:
- how often I’m at the dinner table
- how much we grow
- how well I take care of the machine (me)
My mantra for 2026
No self-imposed limits. No wasted miles.
Because that’s the whole lesson in one line:
Step into the opportunity—and protect what matters while you do it.