About me, briefly.

From 2012 to 2013, my wife and I walked across the United States. San Francisco to Delaware, on foot, with packs on our backs. It took fourteen months and somewhere around three thousand miles, depending on how you count.

I bring it up because most About pages start with a job title or a credential, and I think it’s more useful to tell you something that’s actually true about how I work. I’m someone who finishes things. Long things, slow things, things that turn out to be harder than they looked at the start. That trait has shaped every project I’ve taken on since.

I’ve been writing professionally for almost twenty years. National food brands (Otis Spunkmeyer, Lamb Weston, Borden, Kerry Beverages). Private banking (Loft Advisors, the private wealth division of First Dakota National Bank). Higher education (Dordt University). National non-profits (Good Samaritan Society). A long stretch as a creative director at a church, leading a team of five. Plus plenty of hired-gun freelance work over the years for clients who came to me through word of mouth.

The thread through all of it has been the same: figuring out what makes a business or organization sound like itself, and then writing in a way that makes that sound come through. Industries change. The job doesn’t.

These days I lead copywriting in-house at a global non-profit, in addition to freelance work in the evenings and on weekends. The full-time role keeps me sharp on strategic and brand-level work. The freelance practice is where I get to work directly with small and mid-size businesses — the kind of voice-driven projects that don’t fit inside a big organization’s needs.

Most copy is written defensively. The writer plays it safe, picks the words least likely to offend, smooths out anything interesting, and the result is technically fine — and totally forgettable. AI accelerates the problem but didn’t create it. It’s been around longer than AI has.

I write the other way. The job is to find what’s actually true about a business and put it on the page without sanding it down to nothing. Sometimes that means asking questions the client wasn’t expecting. Sometimes it means pushing back when the obvious draft is the boring one. Usually it means listening more than writing, especially at the start of a project.

This might sound like I take the craft too seriously. I don’t. The copy serves the business, not the other way around, and I’ll happily kill a line I love if a better one takes its place. But the writing should sound like somebody wrote it. That’s the whole point.

A little context on the person you’d be working with, in case it matters.

I live in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, with my wife, our four kids, and three dogs. (Yes, three dogs. I know.) We also have four kids in Heaven, which has shaped our family in ways I won’t try to explain in a paragraph on a website. If you’ve never experienced true chaos, you’re welcome at our house anytime before bedtime.

My wife and I are deeply involved in our church, and raising our kids to know Jesus is probably the single most important thing I do with my life. Everything else — including the writing — sits somewhere below that.

I love living in Sioux Falls. I hate that it’s cold most of the year. Then again, the cold keeps the riff raff out. So…you win some, you lose some.

You probably have a good sense by now of who you’d be working with. If the kind of writer described above is the kind of writer you’d want for your project, the next step is an email.