Career

Twenty years of it came before the software: advertising, public relations, radio sales, retail and solar. Different products, different decades, and the same job throughout — find the person with the problem, explain the thing in their language, and be there when it matters.

Chicago agencies — 2000 to 2005

Greg entered DePaul University's Integrated Marketing Education honors program and went to work at Cramer-Krasselt — then the largest independent advertising agency in the United States, on Michigan Avenue — in the Account Service department. His accounts included Wendy's, Moen, Kemper Insurance and Harris Bank.

On the Wendy's account he sat on the crisis team during the chili-finger episode, when a customer in Nevada was reported to have found a human finger in her chili and the claim turned out to be an insurance fraud. He monitored national media every morning and summarized the findings for the client's executives before their day began. He also worked on one of the first influencer-marketing programs, built to position Wendy's around healthier options by taking the message to the dietitian community rather than through the usual advertising channels. The audience you need is rarely the audience you assumed.

He conceived, designed and built the Moen competitive-advertising site himself — every competitor's print, digital and television advertising gathered onto one private site for the client — and it earned the agency-wide Krasselt Award for Creativity. After Cramer-Krasselt came three years at Ketchum Public Relations, a global firm working on Fortune 500 accounts, and then a turn as Associate Brand Manager at O2 COOL, a manufacturer and marketer of misting fans and personal cooling products.

Radio in Aurora — 2006 to 2011

After seven years of three-hour daily commutes, Greg left Chicago for his hometown of Aurora, the second-largest city in Illinois, and went into media as an account executive for a NextMedia radio cluster of five stations based in Aurora and Joliet. His main responsibility was securing sponsors for WERV 95.9 The River, a classic hits station heavily involved in the community.

In a market like that, sponsorship means the city itself. The City of Aurora and the Mayor's Office of Special Events were clients, which put him inside the annual Blues on the Fox festival and the Downtown Alive! series, alongside the Paramount Arts Centre. The municipal roster ran on from there: the Downtown St. Charles Partnership, and the City of Geneva with its Swedish Days festival. On the commercial side he held the Hotel Baker in St. Charles, Ballydoyle Irish Pubs and Pheasant Run Resort, among others.

He wrote and produced more than 500 radio spots during those years and built the promotions around them: on-site competitions, live broadcasts, online contests, online advertising, email marketing and website development. He was a member of the Aurora, St. Charles and Geneva chambers of commerce, and marketing chairperson of the board of the Aurora Green Fest, where he produced the city's first solar-powered concert with The Giving Tree Band. He did not know it at the time, but that was a first draft of the work he does now.

Agency, and a detour — 2011 to 2018

NextMedia led back to the agency side. Greg became VP of Client–Media Relations at BMC Worldwide — Bad Monkey Circus — a boutique integrated advertising agency where the title was invented to cover a lot of ground. He held the City of Aurora account, ran a website redesign and development project for the city, and worked on the campaign he is still proudest of from that period: ShineOntario for the global solar manufacturer SunPower, an integrated television, radio, web and social campaign in Ontario, Canada, conceived to hold public support for solar feed-in tariffs through an election that became a referendum on them. The campaign held the ground it was built to hold.

A couple of years and some good clients later he left advertising for something more straight-laced: a Senior Account Executive role at the web startup Straight North in Downers Grove, Illinois, bringing in B2B clients for its lead-generating website work.

A difficult divorce then led to a break from professional life. He sold his house and traveled the country for two years in an RV — friends and family, music festivals, new places and new ways of living. He came back to Aurora and went to work for an old client from the radio and advertising days, Hot Tub Tony's, selling hot tubs and managing the marketing for the chain of retail stores. After about a year he moved to Denver, at the suggestion of his former manager at the radio station.

Solar in Colorado — 2018 to 2024

Colorado began in a call center, setting appointments for solar sales representatives, which is where he learned the front end of the funnel. He learned the sales side and was promoted to a sales position at B Green. A second break from professional life ran into the pandemic; when it subsided he went back to solar at Valor Roof and Solar, where he added the roofing side of the business and spent the 2023 hail season helping homeowners get their houses repaired and their claims through.

Independent — 2024 to present

In 2024 he started an independent solar sales firm, Sexy.solar, built on an approach he called extreme electrification: not an array bolted to a roof but the whole house converted — heat pump, electric appliances, an EV — so the incentives stack and the running costs fall. Selling remotely across 23 states meant learning to carry a technical product without ever standing in the same room as the buyer.

That is also where the AI work began: writing prompts and grading model output for training tasks, then building the workflows and agent systems described under Practice. The through-line is not a change of subject. Selling radio spots, agency strategy, solar systems or state contracts is the same job — find the person with the problem, explain the thing in their language, and be there when it matters.

The current work is on the about page.