About Josh

I came up in and around the trades. My first real chapter of work was in-house marketing and contract sales for a commercial and residential painting company — managing the website, chasing down leads, and sitting across the table from customers to close the job. Selling a repaint teaches you something a CRM diagram never will: the system on paper and the system in reality are two different things, and the person who closes the gap is the one who actually understands both ends of it.

I spent the years after that widening the aperture — from SEO and digital campaigns for contractors and small businesses into full go-to-market operations. In 2017 I founded Elevado MKTG, a bilingual digital consultancy for mid-sized businesses. We handled the unglamorous, load-bearing work: Salesforce and Infusionsoft implementations, marketing automation, and full-stack GTM builds for teams that needed a revenue-ops function to exist but couldn't staff a whole department for it.

I've been at Lucidworks since 2021, where I started in marketing operations and grew into Senior Manager of GTM Operations. Today I own the GTM systems that sit behind sales and marketing: Salesforce, Marketo, HubSpot, and the custom AI layer that makes those systems more useful than their default configuration. Some days that means lifecycle architecture and handoff rules. Some days it means Apex, SOQL, Python, SQL, React, or Next.js because the vendor tool does not quite fit the job.

I'm a self-taught engineer, and I got there for practical reasons. I got tired of being blocked by roadmaps I didn't control. The certifications came along the way — Salesforce Certified Administrator and Marketo Engage Certified — but the credential I trust most is still a system that has been running in production long enough for people to forget it used to be a problem. I did coursework in Digital Communication & Media at Brigham Young University–Idaho, I'm bilingual in English and Spanish, and I'm based just outside Portland, Oregon.

The through-line is pretty simple: I build rather than maintain. I've replaced paid vendors with in-house tooling, built account-health and forecast scoring, wired AI into CRM context, and shipped systems that make messy GTM work easier to act on. This site is where I write about that gap — not the glossy version of GTM software, but the space between what platforms ship and what teams actually need.

Away from the keyboard, you'll usually find me somewhere in the Northwest wilderness with my wife, our kids, and our dog Bella — and when I'm not, I'm probably playing guitar, running a stoplight concert in the car, or unwinding with a good video game.

Contact

The best way to reach me is by email at ownfir@gmail.com, or on LinkedIn.