I walk into a business, look at everything from the outside in, and tell the owner what I see. Then I put together a plan to fix it, set the benchmarks so we both know if it's working, and stay long enough to make sure it holds.
I'm a marketing consultant and business strategist with over fifteen years of hands-on experience in search engine optimization, digital strategy, customer pipeline development, public relations, and financial modeling. I spent more than a decade as an investigative journalist. I audit your brand, your marketing, your operations, and your use of technology. I find the gaps, tell you what they're costing you, and put together the systems to close them.
I've spent my career building new customer pipelines for organizations that didn't have them, rebuilding pipelines that stopped producing, and designing the marketing infrastructure that keeps revenue consistent month over month. I know how to read a P&L, project a return on a marketing investment, and tell you honestly whether a strategy is worth the spend before you commit to it.
My background in journalism trained me to reach conclusions based on evidence, never assumptions. I apply that same discipline to every aspect of your business: finding where your customers actually are, what messaging actually works, and which strategies will actually produce a return. I invariably reach evidence-based conclusions. That's not a slogan. It's how I operate.
That financial and investigative discipline matters. A lot of consultants can tell you what to do. Not many can tell you what it should cost, what it should return, by when, and show you the research that backs it up. I can.
Marketing audits and strategy
Search engine optimization
Brand positioning and messaging
Website development
New customer pipeline design
Customer base research and targeting
Go-to-market planning
Content strategy and execution
Public relations and media strategy
Operational systems and SOPs
AI workflow design and training
Financial projections and ROI modeling
Fair question. It deserves a real answer.
An AI tool can generate a marketing plan for your business in thirty seconds. It'll look polished. It'll sound confident. And most of it will be generic advice that could apply to any business in any city in any industry. It doesn't know your market. It hasn't walked your neighborhood. It hasn't talked to your customers or studied your competitors' pricing or spent an afternoon figuring out why your website converts at 1% when it should be converting at 4%.
AI is a tool. I use it every day. But a tool without context is just noise.
Here's what I bring that a prompt never will.
Local market intelligence
I don't run your SEO through a template. I research your specific market, your specific competitors, and the specific search behavior of people in your area looking for what you sell. I've been doing search engine optimization for over fifteen years. I know the difference between ranking for a keyword and ranking for a keyword that actually brings someone through your door with money to spend.
Customer base research
This is where my background in investigative journalism changes the game. I spent more than a decade tracking down information for a living, verifying sources, following evidence, and reaching conclusions based on facts rather than assumptions. I apply that same methodology to finding your customers.
I track down every possible vertical of your client base. Where they are. What social media platforms they actually use. Where they spend their time online and offline. What messaging resonates with them and what doesn't. I don't guess. I don't assume your customers are on Instagram because "everyone's on Instagram." I find the evidence and follow it. The conclusions I reach are based on data, not hunches.
Financial accountability
I don't hand you a strategy and say "good luck." I project what the investment should return, I set the timeline, and I report on the numbers. If I recommend spending $2,000 a month on content and SEO, I can tell you what that should produce in traffic, leads, and revenue within 90 days, and I'll be the first person to tell you if it's not working so we can adjust before you've wasted money.
Pipeline architecture
Getting attention is one thing. Turning attention into customers is something else entirely. I design the full path: how someone finds you, what they see when they arrive, what convinces them to reach out, what happens after they do, and what keeps them coming back.
AI can't design that for you because AI doesn't know what your receptionist says when the phone rings or how long it takes your team to follow up on a lead.
Public relations and earned media
I know how to get you in print and on television. Not because I have some trick. Because I spent years on the other side of the desk as a journalist, and I understand exactly what reporters are looking for, how to pitch a story that actually gets covered, and how to authentically share your story within your community in a way that earns attention instead of buying it.
I know which editors cover which beats. I know the difference between a pitch that gets deleted and one that gets a callback. This isn't trickery. It's relationships, experience, and a core understanding of how public relations, media, and journalists actually operate.
Judgment
This is the part that's hardest to explain and easiest to recognize once you've experienced it. I've spent years across healthcare, sales, journalism, and small business operations. I've seen what works and what doesn't across dozens of industries. I know when a strategy sounds exciting but won't hold up in practice. I know when a business owner is about to spend money on the wrong thing because someone with a nice slide deck made it sound urgent.
That kind of pattern recognition doesn't come from a prompt. It comes from years of doing the work.
None of this is meant to dismiss AI. I teach businesses how to use it. I design AI systems for my clients. I believe in the technology deeply. But the person who sets up the system, who understands your business well enough to know which questions to ask and which outputs to trust, that person is not replaceable by the tool itself.
You need me when you know something isn't working but you can't pinpoint what it is. When you're spending on marketing but can't trace it to revenue. When your website exists but doesn't produce. When you're growing but the systems underneath can't keep up. When you've tried doing it yourself and the results were fine but not what they should be.
That's the gap I close. Not with theory. With specific, measurable work that you can see, track, and hold me accountable for.
I'd rather you know this upfront than find out after we've started. If any of these are dealbreakers, we're not the right fit, and that's completely fine.
I don't run your social media accounts.
I do something more valuable: I teach your team to do it themselves. Once they understand what content actually performs, where the conversation is happening online, and where your specific customers spend their time, they don't need someone posting for them. They need the strategy and the confidence to execute it. That's what I provide.
I don't do graphic design.
I direct the creative vision and write the briefs, then coordinate with designers who execute. You'll never get a logo or a brochure directly from me, but you will get clear direction on what it should say and why.
I don't manage paid ad campaigns.
I design the ad strategy, identify the targeting, write the messaging, and set the budget parameters. A certified ads specialist handles the platform management. I oversee the results and adjust the strategy when needed.
I don't do vague deliverables.
Every engagement has defined outputs, measurable benchmarks, and clear timelines. If I can't tell you exactly what you're getting and when you're getting it, I won't take the work.
I don't lock you into long-term contracts before you've seen results.
Work is structured around deliverables, not duration. You continue because the numbers justify it, not because you signed something twelve months ago.
I don't do work I can't measure.
If there's no way to track whether something is producing results, I won't recommend it. Your money goes toward strategies with verifiable outcomes.
I don't pretend to be a one-person agency.
I'm a strategist and builder. When execution requires a specialist, I bring in the right person, manage the relationship, and make sure the work stays aligned with the strategy. You always know who's doing what.
I don't tell you what you want to hear.
If something isn't working, I'll say so. If your idea won't produce results, I'll explain why and offer an alternative. You're paying for honesty and expertise, not reassurance.
I don't invent your brand. I find it.
Most branding processes start with a whiteboard and a brainstorm. Mine starts with a question: who were you before you had a logo? What did you promise people before anyone wrote a mission statement?
The answers are already inside your organization. They're in the story your founder tells at dinner when someone asks how this whole thing got started. They're in whatever it is about this place that made your best employee stay when a competitor offered more money.
Those things are your brand. Everything else is just typography.
I've walked into businesses where the owner has a story that would stop you cold, real weight behind why they started, and none of it shows up anywhere a customer would see it. Buried on an About page three clicks deep. Or never written down at all.
You know the feeling. You're at a dinner party, someone asks what you do, and you explain it so well that their whole face changes. They get it. Then you go back to your website on Monday and it sounds like a stranger wrote it.
A founding narrative document, in your voice, that tells the real story of why this business exists. A positioning statement your whole team can repeat cold. Voice and tone guidelines that end the "how should we say this?" debate for good. A differentiation strategy that makes it clear why you're not interchangeable with the place down the street.
Founders who know they're different but can't seem to get it on paper. Small businesses that are tired of blending in. Healthcare and senior services organizations that refuse to sound like a brochure written by someone who's never met a patient.
Knowing what to say is only half of it.
I've watched this happen more times than I can count. An organization spends months working on a brand strategy. Real money. Real effort. They hand the finished product to their marketing team, and then nothing happens.
The brand deck sits in a shared drive. The positioning statement comes up once in a meeting and never again. Six months later the website still reads like it was written by a committee.
That's a systems problem. Your brand language needs structure underneath it. A content plan built around what your team can actually produce week to week. An SEO strategy based on how your customers look for businesses like yours. A process that turns your voice into something people use on Monday morning.
I spent years in channel-based sales at BlueStar SeniorTech, working with dealers and resellers across the country. What I learned is something most marketing consultants never experience firsthand: the organizations that grow aren't the ones spending the most. They're the ones whose people can explain what they do, clearly, to the right person, without checking a script.
If the message can't travel outside the slide deck, it's dead.
A marketing audit with specific findings that actually go somewhere. SEO strategy grounded in how your customers search. A content system your team can run weekly without a marketing degree. Timelines, benchmarks, and the specific metrics we track together.
Companies with a strong reputation and a weak online presence. Businesses launching something new that need a plan for telling people about it. Teams where marketing has been falling to whoever has an extra hour, and it shows.
A great message that lives in a slide deck is worthless.
Most consultants hand you a strategy document and wish you luck. I stay and put together the thing that makes it stick.
That means actual workflows. Actual scripts. The checklists and quality standards that make your brand promise show up in how your team answers the phone, handles a complaint, writes a follow-up email.
What people experience when they walk through your door matters more than what your website says about you. Dramatically more.
I built Sentinel Silver from nothing. Every service protocol, every escalation procedure was designed around a single question: if this were my grandmother on the other end of the phone, would this be good enough?
That kind of consistency doesn't come from hiring good people. Good people are the starting point. The system is what keeps them from having to guess.
Standard operating procedures your team can follow without you in the room. Workflow maps for how a customer moves through your business. CRM setup and automation that captures what you actually need. Training protocols that get a new hire to competence in weeks.
Businesses growing past the point where the owner can personally touch everything. Service companies where the quality of the experience depends on who picks up the phone. Anyone who knows what good looks like but has never gotten it written down.
The tool is never the answer. The workflow is.
Nobody is an AI expert. Not me. Not the person selling you an AI course on LinkedIn. Not the consultant who added "AI Strategist" to their title six months ago.
This technology changes so fast, sometimes by the hour, that anyone claiming to have it figured out is either lying to you or not paying close enough attention. What I am is someone who shows up every day, tracks what's shifting, tests it inside real businesses, and translates what I find into something a normal person can use.
I need to tell you why I built these systems, because it matters.
I was diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder as a kid. For most of my life, the way other people organized information and managed their work didn't fit my brain. I couldn't take someone else's framework and expect consistent results.
So I stopped trying to force it and started building my own. Visual triggers instead of dense paragraphs. One step at a time instead of a 15-page manual. Templates I could grab without relying on memory. Safety nets for the moments when focus drops, because it always does.
What I found out is that systems designed for the distracted brain turn out to be better for every brain.
Everybody's distracted. Everybody's short on time. Nobody reads the manual. If a workflow requires perfect execution to produce a good result, it's a bad workflow.
My grandmother Maureen used to tell me about watching the Moon landing in 1969. She told that story for decades. I believe, and I mean this, that artificial intelligence is that kind of moment.
Not because of what the technology can do today. Because of what it tells us about where human capability is headed. Same as the space program. It wasn't about rockets. It was about a country that understood what it was trying to prove and then built the discipline to get there.
AI is the same. The technology is meaningless if you don't first understand what you're trying to protect, who you're serving, and what your standards are. Identity comes first. Then the technology amplifies it.
I set up these systems with humans making every critical decision. Ethical guardrails. Verification steps. Deployment protocols that are documented and enforced. And then I stay and teach your team how it works until they trust it because they understand it.
AI workflows designed for your specific operations. A verification system so your team can trust the outputs. An honest assessment of which tools you need and which are wasting your money. Hands-on training with your people. Ethical guardrails written into every workflow from the start.
Healthcare organizations watching AI reshape their industry. Small businesses that need somebody to cut through the noise. Teams paying for tools nobody touches. Anyone who wants this technology to make their people sharper, not anxious.
You can't market something you haven't defined. You can't systematize something you don't understand yet. And you shouldn't automate anything until you're clear on what's worth keeping.
Most organizations skip the hard part and jump straight to tactics. Then they wonder why nothing holds together.
I start with what's true and work outward from there.
If you want to see how I think before we ever talk, read My Thoughts. I write about businesses I visit, industries I study, and problems I keep seeing in how organizations talk to the people they're trying to reach.
People who built something real and need the right person to help them communicate it and grow it.
Restaurants and food service
Med spas and cosmetic injectors
Plastic surgeons and specialty practices
Doctor's offices and medical groups
Home care and hospice providers
Senior living and assisted living communities
Solo entrepreneurs and service providers
Local retail and specialty shops
Nonprofits and mission-driven organizations
Law firms and professional services
Dental and orthodontic practices
Real estate teams and brokerages
If you don't see your industry here, that doesn't mean I can't help. It means we should talk: Ryan@RyanRMiner.com | (240) 244-7075
We talk. I listen.
You tell me what's going on. What's frustrating you. Where the gaps feel the biggest. I ask questions, most of which you haven't been asked before, because I'm looking at your business the way your customers do.
I go look for myself.
Your website. Your Google presence. Your reviews. Your competitors. How your brand shows up when someone searches for what you do.
I look at what a first-time customer sees in the first thirty seconds and what they miss entirely. I look at where you're spending money and whether it's producing anything. This takes real time because I do the actual research.
I tell you what I found.
No sugarcoating. Here's what's working. Here's what's broken. Here's what's invisible to your customer. Here's what your competitors are doing that you should know about.
I include the data. I show my work.
We decide what to fix first.
Not everything at once. I identify the changes with the most immediate impact on revenue, customer experience, or efficiency, and we start there. You'll know exactly what we're doing, why, and what result we're expecting.
I build it with you. Not for you.
Whatever we tackle, I design the system, set it up, and train your team to run it. The whole point is that when I leave, the thing keeps working. You own the deliverables whether I'm there or not.
We measure.
Specific numbers. Agreed on before we start. If something's working, we push harder. If it's not, we adjust. You never have to wonder.
I figure out who your best customers are, where they're looking for businesses like yours, and what message makes them pick up the phone.
Research and data, not guesswork. The specific channels and the specific language that reach the people most likely to spend money with you.
Most businesses lose customers not because something went wrong, but because nothing happened. No follow-up. No relationship. No reason to come back other than memory.
I set up the systems that keep you in front of people after the first visit. Email. Content. Referral structures. Loyalty touchpoints. Simple things done consistently that turn a one-time buyer into someone who sends their friends.
Inconsistent revenue almost always traces back to inconsistent visibility. You're busy for three weeks so marketing stops. Then it's slow for two so you scramble.
I put together a marketing rhythm your team can sustain even during the busiest months. Something that doesn't depend on you remembering to post on Instagram.
You're doing eleven jobs because nobody else knows how you want things done.
I document your processes, map the workflows, set up the automations, and train your people until they can handle it without you standing over them. The point is to get you back to the part of the business only you can do.
We measure it. Together. We agree on the numbers before I touch anything, and I report on them at regular intervals.
If something isn't moving, we change the approach. No jargon. No six-month runway. You'll know.
You don't. Not yet. And I'd be suspicious of anyone who expected you to take their word for it.
Here's what I can point to: an MBA, over a decade in healthcare services and community relations, years in channel-based sales moving product through dealer networks across the country, a career in investigative journalism that trained me to verify everything before I open my mouth, and two businesses I launched from scratch using the exact systems I'm offering to set up for you.
But the real answer is simpler. Read what I write on this site. Look at how I think. If it resonates, reach out. If it doesn't, I'm probably not the right fit.
When was the last time you looked at your business the way a first-time customer sees it? Not from behind the counter. From the parking lot. From the Google results page. From the moment someone lands on your website and has about eight seconds to decide if you're worth their time.
And do you know where your customers actually come from? Not a general sense. The data. Which channels drive people through the door, which ones are burning money, and which ones you've never tried because nobody mentioned them.
Most small businesses spend on marketing they've never measured. That's the single biggest opportunity sitting in front of you right now.
Probably because you're good at what you do. A lot of solid businesses run for years on reputation and the owner working harder than one person should have to.
That holds until a competitor shows up with a better website and a Google Ads budget. Or your best referral source moves away. Or you look up one day and realize you've been so busy serving customers that you never set up the system that brings in the next ones.
Your customers are making decisions before they walk through your door. They're reading reviews, comparing websites, judging your business on what they find in thirty seconds of scrolling. If your online presence doesn't match the quality of what you actually deliver, you're losing people who would have loved what you do.
Both digital and traditional, and I tell you which ones make sense for your specific situation. A med spa and a law firm have completely different customers searching in completely different ways.
The short version: SEO so people searching for what you do actually find you. Content that positions you as the authority. Email systems that keep past customers engaged. Google Business Profile optimization, which is free and which most businesses do wrong. Review generation, because social proof is the most powerful marketing that exists and almost everyone leaves it to chance.
Referral programs with real structure. Local partnerships. Event marketing. Direct outreach for B2B. Print when it makes sense, because a well-designed leave-behind sometimes outperforms a month of social posts. And public relations: getting your story in front of journalists and editors who can put you in print, on the news, or in front of audiences you'd never reach through advertising alone.
I don't personally run social media accounts. I teach your team to do it. Once they understand what content works, where the conversations are happening, and where your customers actually spend time, they're better positioned to run it than any outside hire. That's the advantage: you get one person who sees the whole picture and either builds the capability inside your team or coordinates the right people when specialist execution is needed.
Everywhere it's useful. Nowhere it's not.
AI can cut your content production time in half if the workflow is right. It can monitor competitors and flag pricing changes. It can draft emails, analyze customer feedback, generate first versions of marketing copy for a human to refine, automate appointment reminders, and run research that would take forty hours in about forty minutes.
These aren't hypotheticals. I use all of this in my own businesses every week.
What AI cannot do is replace your judgment. It doesn't understand your customer the way you do. And it will produce garbage if nobody sets up the guardrails. That's what I do. I design the workflows, put the verification steps in place, and train your team to use them responsibly. The point isn't to impress anyone. It's results with less waste.
Depends on what you need. I won't put a number on this page because I'd rather give you an honest figure based on your actual situation.
What I will say: everything is structured around deliverables with clear timelines. You see what you're getting. You see whether it's working. You decide whether to continue based on evidence, not a contract.