What people say I'm good at
I've asked. Three things come up over and over.
- Making complicated growth marketing simple. Nicole, a Head of Creative at a healthcare company, told me I'm the only person she knows who can explain the same thing to a preschool teacher and a C-suite exec and have both of them get it. That's the whole job, as far as I'm concerned. If the founder and the media buyer can't both explain why we're doing something, we aren't doing it yet.
- Picking up new technology fast, and knowing where it belongs. I adopt AI tools like it's nothing, and I bring them into the work wherever they make the work better. The second half of that sentence is the important half. A lot of people can install a tool. Judging whether it should be there at all is the part I'm paid for.
- Caring about the bottom line more than anything else. I've worked at bootstrapped companies, built my own, and been through stretches of my life with no money in the bank. I know what it feels like to need every dollar to count. So I judge marketing on cash flow, MER and contribution margin, not on whatever number a platform dashboard wants to show me.
How I got here
I lived in Alabama for twelve years before I moved to St. Louis for college. In high school I went to the Alabama School of Math and Science, a public boarding school where I got to take differential equations, build robots on the robotics team, and study Latin for years. The Latin class took a trip to Italy that I still think about. It's the first time I remember feeling how big the world was and wanting to be part of a lot of it.
The other half of my childhood was art. My mom was the president of our local arts league, and every summer we put on an arts camp for several hundred elementary-aged kids: theater, dance, pottery, painting, every kind of art you can think of. So I grew up with equations on one side and paint on the other, and I've been blending the two ever since. I studied physics and psychology at Washington University in St. Louis, which is about as literal as that blend gets.
My career in marketing started by accident. I applied for what I thought was an engineering internship at Procter & Gamble and it turned out to be a customer business development role selling Iams dog food to Walmart. I got the job. Sales wasn't where I wanted to stay, but it introduced me to marketing, and I fell hard for P&G's consumer market knowledge group, the people who studied every detail of how someone decides to buy something. From there things moved quickly.
- Procter & GambleThe accidental sales internship that turned into a love of consumer research.
- Anheuser-BuschSupply chain optimization. Different problem, same math.
- Varsity TutorsJoined when it was a three-city regional company. Left when it was international. It went public at over a billion dollars.
- SlalomConsulting: international research studies with Enterprise, data and information center rebuilds for Sentic Healthcare and Edward Jones, cloud transformation with Equifax.
- BEGiNBuilt a brand-new online education program called KidPass, then got promoted to run Little Passports, the company's highest-revenue line and a subscription box for kids.
- WuffesLed growth and marketing for a bootstrapped pet supplement brand. We took it from $14M to $40M+, and 28 of the company's 42 people were in my org.
- The Growth DenWhere I am now. See below.
What I'm doing now
I run The Growth Den, a fractional growth advisory for growth-stage DTC and e-commerce brands. I plug in wherever growth is stuck. Some weeks that means owning strategy, some weeks it means running creative, and some weeks it means sitting in Ads Manager because that's the lever. Whatever the seat, the thing I'm building is a system the company owns and a team that can run it without me.
Right now that includes Knownwell, a healthcare company that treats people of every size with real respect, and Autobrush, a brand built around kids' oral health, plus a few others. I want to keep working with companies where I can do good in the world and do well for the business at the same time. I'm lucky enough at this point in my career to be picky about that, so I am.
"I have been so impressed with Logan's work, communication, and results! For the first time in our business, I feel like I have clarity into every important decision, and his pulse on our specific goals combined with his attentive responses and action are truly incredible. It's such a gift to get to work with someone who can lead both strategy and execution. I would have paid 20x for an agency for the same engagement, and probably a worse outcome. Beyond the excellence in his work, Logan is such a passionate, inclusive, and culture-driven part of this team, demonstrating influential leadership in even a fractional engagement. 11/10, can't recommend enough. Would hire him anywhere!"
Ari, Head of Marketing, Autobrush
I also speak and teach. I was a guest on The STL Bucket List Show talking about the real difference between demand generation and demand capture, and I spoke at the Midwest Digital Marketing Conference on standing out in a sea of sameness. I write a newsletter called Notes from the Den.
Who I like working with
Founders who like to learn and like to iterate. I'm not looking for a situation where I plug in and push the same button over and over, and I'm not looking to stand in front of a room of nodding heads. I want a thought partner. Somebody who will riff with me, argue with me, and change my mind sometimes, and who has a product or a service that actually matters. I'm not in the business of selling a widget nobody needs, and I don't think you should be either.
If that's you, the seats and pricing pages have the practical details, and the twelve questions page has the ones you should ask me before you hire me.
Life outside the work
My whole reason for building The Growth Den the way I did is time with my family. My wife Kasey runs a wedding photography business called Iceing, and I'm her assistant photographer on weekends. Our daughter Ruth is six and reads everything she can get her hands on. Our son Lewie is three and is a dinosaur-obsessed ball of pure sunshine. I built a business that stops at 4:00 in the afternoon so I can be with the three of them. I'm not going to pretend that's a side note. It's the point.
I love St. Louis. It's big enough that there's always something to do and small enough that you don't get lost in it the way you can in Chicago or New York. I've built relationships in every corner of this town, and I get to make my own dent here, which is a thing I'm not sure I could say somewhere bigger.
Every year I run Miles for Meso in memory of my mom, who fought mesothelioma harder than I've ever seen anyone fight anything. Our team, Winky's Warriors, has finished in the top three for fundraising three years running. It's one of the happiest mornings of my year, and I'd love for you to come run it with us.
I also play Dungeons & Dragons with a group of eight friends. We're all in our 30s and 40s with kids and spouses and jobs, and we still get together every other week, or at the very least once a month, to eat dinner and roll dice and laugh at each other. I wrote about what the game taught me about running a business in Dungeons & Dragons & Dialogue, Six Years Later. Yes, I'm the Dungeon Master.
What I believe
All people are people. Everyone deserves a real chance to be successful, and everyone has it in them to be. I've been on the side of that where the chance wasn't obvious, and I've been lucky enough to end up on the side where I get to choose who I work with. When you have that kind of privilege, I think you owe it to somebody. So when I meet people who want to do good in the world, in whatever way that looks like for them, I try to help however I can.