Joel founded Gift2Grow with the intent of finding a better way to foster business growth by offering an alternative to the marketing agency model: something fast, easy, affordable, personal, and meaningful -- self-service SaaS vs services. Gift2Grow’s philosophy is that self-promotion works best when it’s self-less: it’s better to give than to ask.

With the acquisition of Joel's agency, Switchyard, in November of 2013, Joel upgraded his marketing and advertising experience to the national and global level with clients like American Express, 7-Eleven, Pepsi, Frito-Lay, and others—a broad spectrum of companies with different needs. As division head, Joel transitioned his team at Switchyard to become Rally’s new digital arm, and brought his technical, strategic, and operational expertise as well as proven processes and methodologies that made Switchyard so agile and successful. Joel was responsible for the overall success and profitability of the digital division. This included: P&L responsibility, oversight of internal operations and leadership, development of new business, and strategizing for Rally’s digital accounts and client relationships.Eighteen months after being acquired, Joel left Rally to found his second startup, Gift2Grow.

Joel and two co-founders started Switchyard with $300 dollars apiece and the donations of their own laptops to the LLC. Over its four-year lifespan, Switchyard achieved a 97% yearly growth average, and fostered a culture that was lean and scrappy, innovative, and reflective—the organization continually optimized processes, and applied them religiously. Above all, Switchyard’s founders and employees built their organization on the core value of respect, which defined everything they did. The founders, with their tech backgrounds, applied lean startup and agile methodologies to the operations level of the business, which kept Switchyard a uniquely nimble, efficient, and results-driven organization. The value soon became clear: in 2011, Switchyard beat out seventeen other agencies to win Travel Portland’s agency of record partnership. Switchyard built a list of enigmatic local clients, including the Portland Timbers, Portland Community College, Voicebox, and others.As Principal and Director of Accounts, Joel honed the invaluable startup skill of creating the repeatable processes and systems that become the core of an organization. Switchyard’s processes ultimately became its selling point: used with discipline, they made Switchyard a lean and mean organization, all the way down to the bottom line, and could be used to tackle branding problems, innovate creative solutions, and meet diverse client goals.

Joel’s entered the tech world with Vidoop, and over the course of his two-and-a-half years, wore a variety of hats and learned from each unique role: business development, investor relations, product development, product marketing, and research.At Vidoop, Joel gained a field-level intimacy with the demands of the numerous roles within digital organizations. He bootstrapped the product development, marketing, user testing, and adoption of VidoopCAPTCHA, acquired and managed affiliate advertisers for the MyVidoop consumer service, and was chosen to manage the logistics of the company-wide “Oregon Trail” relocation from Tulsa, OK, to Portland, OR—to name a few. Amid this groundwork and perspective-building, Joel began incubating the idea to start his own organization, and began envisioning all the ways in which he could be an excellent manager of people, resources, and the direction of an organization. When he left Vidoop in 2009, Joel set out to do just that.

Joel came to CBRE well-primed for commercial real estate—Joel had learned from his father, a 40+-year commercial real estate vetran, how to lead, manage, and sell, and how to deal with people with respect and honesty. In 2005, his second year at the agency, Joel exceeded $30 million in transactions, and represented over $125 million in listings. He specialized in income-producing retail investment property sales, including the successful acquisition of four new regional store locations for Cingular Wireless. Joel’s experience at CBRE illustrated the reality that profit and growth are not givens, and that there’s no replacement for hard work and tenacity.