Q: Kindly give our readers an introduction to your business. Please include what your business is all about, in which city you are located and if you have offices in multiple locations/ cities.
Ans: Outplay Marketing is a digital marketing agency headquartered in Land O’ Lakes, Florida. We specialize in helping small- to mid-sized businesses capture high-intent local demand and convert visibility into measurable revenue. Our core focus spans Local SEO, Google Business Profile optimization, targeted Google Search Ads, Facebook advertising, review management, and custom website design. Rather than relying on vanity metrics, we engineer practical, end-to-end customer acquisition systems. We operate primarily from Land O’ Lakes, serving clients throughout Pasco, Hillsborough, and Pinellas Counties across the greater Tampa Bay region.
Q: Kindly give us a brief description about yourself (it should include your brief educational or entrepreneurial background and list some of your major achievements).
Ans: I hold a Bachelor of Science degree in Marketing from Penn State University and bring over 30 years of corporate sales and marketing leadership experience to the table. In early 2023, I channeled that corporate foundation into launching Outplay Marketing. Since then, the agency has been voted Best of Florida in the Digital Marketing Firms category for three consecutive years (2024, 2025, and 2026), and I’ve been honored as Local Business Person of the Year in Land O’ Lakes for both 2024 and 2025. I also serve as an active business member and marketing partner with The Greater Pasco Chamber of Commerce and the North Tampa Bay Chamber of Commerce. In 2025, I also became an Amazon best-seller, collaborating with other Tampa business owners on a book about business networking.
Q: What inspired you to (start a new business venture) or (to make significant changes in an existing business)? How did the idea for your business come about?
Ans: After three decades in enterprise corporate sales and marketing, I saw a persistent disconnect in how agencies served local and regional business owners. Many local service businesses were being sold vague deliverables and vanity metrics that didn’t drive bottom-line revenue. I launched Outplay Marketing in 2023 to bring structured corporate discipline, clear ROI tracking, and high-intent customer acquisition directly to business owners looking for measurable growth.
Q: What three pieces of advice would you give to budding entrepreneurs?
Ans: Focus on cash flow and high-intent demand first: Don’t burn capital chasing vanity engagement; build offerings that solve urgent, expensive problems for your clients.
Standardize your operations early: Document your processes and use automation to handle repetitive workflows so your time stays focused on high-leverage client acquisition and delivery.
Embed yourself in your local community: Strong, active local networks and strategic partnerships yield far more resilient, recurring business than cold outreach alone. People still buy from people.
Q: What would you say are the top three skills needed to be a successful entrepreneur?
Ans: Discipline and execution: The ability to follow through consistently long after the initial excitement wears off.
Commercial clarity: Understand how your product or solution either increases their profitability, or saves them money. Businesses only make decisions on those 2 criteria.
Adaptability: The agility to pivot tactics and change strategies based on data rather than assumptions.
Q: How many hours do you work a day on average?
Ans: It’s not a question of quantity, but quality. If you’re serving your customers well, while continuing to do the things to grow your business, than it doesn’t matter how many hours your work, whether that’s 10 hours or 60 hour per week. It’s about the results that matter.
Q: To what do you most attribute your success?
Ans: Consistency, direct accountability, and deep community relationships. Treating client marketing budgets as direct investments that require demonstrable returns has created long-term retention and powerful referral momentum. There’s an old saying – “Fortune is in the follow-up”, and I believe this to be absolutely true.
Q: How do you go about marketing your business? What has been your most successful form of marketing?
Ans: We practice what we preach: high-visibility Local SEO, optimized Google Business Profile placement, and targeted search campaigns. Just as critically, our most successful acquisition channel has been active relationship building—most notably our strategic partnership and ongoing work with The Greater Pasco Chamber of Commerce and The North Tampa Chamber of Comerce, alongside word-of-mouth referrals from local clients seeing tangible revenue growth.
Q: What is the best way to achieve long-term success?
Ans: Delivering undeniable value and protecting your reputation at all costs. In agency work and entrepreneurship, sustained success comes from retaining clients through consistent performance, transparent communication, and evolving your playbook ahead of industry shifts.
Q: Excluding yours, what company or business do you admire the most?
Ans: It’s got to be Apple, and specifically Steve Jobs. When it came to launching the highly successful iPad (one of my favorite devices), he firmly believed that market research was limited because “people don’t know what they want until you show it to them”. He felt that asking customers what they wanted would only result in incremental changes to existing products rather than true breakthroughs. He famously said, “If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, ‘A faster horse!’” As a marketer, that thinking always fascinated me – to know your market so well that you have the confidence to move forward. To that point, he said, “You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You can’t start with the technology and try to figure out where you’re going to try and sell it.”
Q: What motivates you?
Ans: When you get that call or email from clients saying they had their best quarter ever, or their best year ever. Delivering high quality results for clients.
Q: What are your ideals?
Ans: Always be highly ethical and measure all decisions by that measuring stick.
Q: How do you generate new ideas?
Ans: The best ideas always come in the shower!
Q: How do you define success?
Ans: Client feedback.
Q: How do you build a successful customer base?
Ans: By leading with value, diagnosing specific pipeline bottlenecks for local businesses, and setting realistic expectations. When you consistently deliver high-intent leads and back every dollar spent with clear tracking, clients stick with you and organically refer other business owners.
Q: What is your favorite aspect of being an entrepreneur?
Ans: Making a positive impact on the local business community.
Q: What has been your most satisfying moment in business?
Ans: Being awarded Best of Florida for Digital Marketing Firms for the third time (2024, 2025, 2026)
Q: What do you feel is the major difference between entrepreneurs and those who work for someone else?
Ans:Drive
Q: In one word, characterize your life as an entrepreneur.
Ans: Gratifying.
Q: If you had the chance to start your career over again, what would you do differently?
Ans: Launched my marketing firm sooner than I did.
Q: How did you decide on the location for your business?
Ans: Land O’ Lakes and the broader Tampa Bay market (including Wesley Chapel, Lutz, and New Tampa) represent one of the fastest-growing residential and commercial corridors in the country. The rapid influx of local service businesses, franchises, and trade contractors created the ideal environment for a dedicated, results-driven digital marketing partner.
Q: If you could talk to one person from history, who would it be and why?
Ans: Benjamin Franklin. Few people have impacted the course of American events. I highly recommend reading his autobiography.
Q: What book has inspired you the most? (OR what is your favorite book?)
Ans: 2 of my favorite books have been The Martian and Project Hail Mary, both by Andy Weir. Probably due to the overwhelming challenges the protagonist faces and how he creatively solves them.
Q: How can you prevent mistakes or do damage control?
Ans: Being transparent and communicating with clients is the only way to work through an issue.
Q: What are your hobbies? What do you do in your non-work time?
Ans: Outside of growing the agency, you can usually find me on the pickleball court playing competitive matches, taking road trips, watching football, and spending quality downtime with my family.
Q: What makes you happy?
Ans: Finding solutions to problems, both in business and my personal life. That and my family.