Twenty years across web, marketing, print advertising, paid, email, and now AI. I run my own businesses (a marketing agency and a travel agency), build the systems behind them, and work with business owners on the thing most AI consulting skips: making these tools useful to the staff who have to use them every day.
“The work happens at the desk, not on the deck.”
[§ 01]
Where I actually come from.
For most of my career I built and ran marketing for small businesses. Websites. Email campaigns. Print and promotional design. PPC that needed to return ROI for someone whose grocery bill depended on it.
I still run that agency, Media Explode. I also run Caballeros Vacations, a full-service travel agency. Two businesses at once, and AI is a big part of how I keep both moving without losing my mind. That's the part most "AI for business" consultants are missing: they've never had to run the thing the tools are supposed to help. It's how I learned which problems matter on a Tuesday afternoon, when a customer is upset and a system isn't doing what you told it to.
Everyone says AI is coming to replace people. In my own businesses it does the opposite. It lets one person carry what used to take a team, and get more done in a day instead of drowning in it. That's how you keep working and still scale, without hiring three more people to do it.
Just like I have boots-in-the-sand experience when I recommend a resort, I have fingers-on-the-keyboard experience building AI systems that actually help people get more done. Not gimmicks. The real question, how the system, the operator, and the staff who use it every day all work together, doesn't get answered in a YouTube video about agents and hooks. It gets answered by someone who has sat in every seat and learned what breaks.
[§] Twenty years across
Pick the angle that fits. Same desk behind all four. Each one boards from the same NYC tower.
Issued by · M.B. · NYC tower · MMXXVI
[§] Three ways in
01
PrimaryFor organizations who need someone who'll actually do the work. I audit how you operate, design the systems, train your staff, and make AI useful to the people doing the daily job. The deliverable is a working system, not a slide deck.
Start a conversation02
I built and operate a packaged platform for businesses that need the standard stack (afterhours phone handling, eClub automation, birthday and review flows, lead capture) running tomorrow, not from scratch. Currently deployed across pharmacies, restaurants, and franchises.
See it in action03
Caballeros Vacations, my full-service travel agency, handles corporate travel, conferences, group offsites, and board events. Same brain behind the systems work, different desk.
Caballeros for business[§] Selected work · Real clients, my own books
Most of this ran through Media Explode, the marketing agency I've owned for over a decade, across restaurants, retail, healthcare, and ecommerce. I run the same systems inside Caballeros Vacations, my own travel agency. I don't advise from the outside; I own the businesses where the work happens.
01
A Brooklyn cafe had a steady flow of new faces and no way to bring them back. I built the loop: signup at the table, a first-visit nudge, a post-visit thank-you, a birthday note. Every step writes back to the CRM, so the next campaign already knows who's drifting away.
02
A neighborhood pharmacy lost every call that came in after closing. I put an AI receptionist on the line that answers from their own knowledge base, takes messages for the morning, and quietly builds a profile on each caller that later feeds refill reminders and birthday coupons.
03
A growing franchise where each location ran its own ad hoc marketing and corporate had to ask a manager for numbers. I rolled out one shared system with room for local tailoring, and reporting that climbs to corporate on its own. Nobody exports a spreadsheet anymore.
04
A haircare brand got suspended by Shopify and Google in the same week, storefront and ads both dark. I found the real root cause, worked both vendors' support teams through the appeals, and rebuilt the paid pipeline from zero back up to scale.
[§] Writing
[§] Let's work together