About Us

A generation ago, one marketing department could cover most of what a brand needed. Today there’s advertising, design, search, content, paid social, influencer marketing, and more. No one person can be the expert in all of it, so companies do the smart thing: they bring in specialists.

Marketing now runs like a home audio system. Each piece can be excellent on its own, but great equipment doesn’t play until it’s wired. Without the right wiring, you get static instead of sound.

For a brand, that looks like dilution. With many hands on it and no formal oversight, your positioning gets averaged down into something generic and safe. Eventually, buyers can’t tell you apart from the competition.

AI is accelerating this mechanism. When anyone can generate copy and visuals in seconds, small misunderstandings of the brand multiply faster than anyone can catch them.

Your people are talented and the tools are powerful. What’s missing is a role.

In a home audio system, someone who knows what they’re doing has to wire it all together. In marketing, that’s the brand director.

I started my career in market research, fresh out of school, working directly with product teams at some of the world’s best-known brands. During those years, a major software company was deciding whether to move from boxed products to subscriptions, and how to bundle its tools into a single suite. I was on the team gathering feedback directly from designers and marketers in the US, the UK, France, and Japan.

What I learned there has shaped everything since: the best companies listen to their customers first, then build. When you understand what your buyers value, and why, strategy stops being a matter of opinion. It becomes clear enough that everyone can get behind it.

A global brand might survey thousands of customers; a Canadian B2B company can learn just as much from a dozen well-chosen conversations with the right clients.

Research tells you what to say. It can’t tell you how that should look, sound, or feel. At Incite, a marketing and design agency, I learned that strategy is only as good as the work that expresses it.

One project shows what that looks like when it goes right. RMS, a risk-management software company serving insurers, needed buyers to trust a process they couldn’t see. The brand had to feel expert, cutting-edge, and all-knowing. Working with our creative team, I led the development of an animation that started from a satellite, zoomed down to a single property, and scanned it with a high-tech overlay for fire and flood risk. In a few seconds, buyers could see how the software thinks. If we’d just shown screenshots of the software, we never would have garnered the lead interest the product deserved.

The project won an ACE Award for the agency, but the real win was that the strategy survived the trip from the source to the sound. I’ve seen the opposite more times than I can count: a sharp strategy that comes back from the creative process sounding like everyone else.

Launching a brand is one thing. Keeping it sounding right, day after day, as markets, competitors, and teams change, is another.

For eight years, I did fractional brand direction at Canada ICI, a national financial services firm. My biggest contribution was giving them permission not to sound like their competitors. In B2B, the instinct is to follow others and make the company the hero of every message. We did the opposite: the customer became the hero, and the brokers were the guide. The harder part was keeping it that way. As the company grew and new brokers and marketers came on board, that principle had to be applied with discipline, until it stuck no matter who was representing the brand.

Stewardship also means working alongside teams who didn’t necessarily ask for you. Coming out of the pandemic, the City of Red Deer’s VP of Recreation asked us to build a communications plan to relaunch their recreation programs, and to help the internal team execute it. The subject matter was very sensitive at the time. We were inviting people back into shared spaces and didn’t want to sound careless.

I’ll be honest, at first there was an underlying “why do we need these guys?” in the room. That’s fair. But, we collaborated closely and as the work started making real progress, we became one team. The proof came later, when the city’s marketing team hired us directly for another campaign.

That’s the part of this job I value most. Not being brought in over a team, but being invited to be a part of it.

After 25 years, I’ve built plenty of marketing assets and run plenty of campaigns. I don’t need to be the one producing the work anymore. There are talented marketers and designers who do that well.

What they rarely have is someone senior in their corner. Someone who’s seen the patterns before, who can explain why a decision matters, and who’ll back them up when the brand is being pulled in five directions.

I studied marketing at the University of Alberta when the fundamentals meant print, outdoor, and broadcast, and email and websites were just arriving. I learned the traditional principles first, then grew alongside every new channel since. That’s why I can talk to your agency, your web team, and your paid media specialist in their own language, and help all of them dial it in for the perfect sound.

BEKS is the culmination of my life’s work. I’m in the second half of my career, and I’ve chosen to spend it where my experience counts most. That means being selective about fit. I’d rather go deep with a few companies I believe in than spread myself thin across many.

For leadership, that means a brand that is consistent and leads. For your team, it means a partner who makes their work better, and easier to defend.

I don’t work alone. Two art directors have been with me from the beginning, and the chemistry between us is incredibly rare in our field of work. Like a matched pair of speakers, they’re built to the same standard, so either one can carry your brand. Both shape the look and feel of the brands we build, and both help me steward them over time.

Just as important, both are patient teachers. They can explain to someone who’s never worked with a designer why a choice matters. That’s often the moment where a team starts to really buy in to what we’re trying to do together.