I spent decades as a CMO doing serious marketing work — seven-figure launches and New York Times bestsellers— while quietly hiding the amateur naturalist who goes to the mountains for sanity, and building toward an ecosystem that was genuinely mine.
This is it.
If you're ready to stop waiting for permission to build your business your way, you're in the right place.
One-One Consultation
A 60-minute diagnostic conversation. One clear direction forward.
You've been circling the same questions for months — what to offer, how to talk about it, what to finally stop doing. You know your work matters. You're just building inside a system that keeps asking you to sand down the parts that are actually yours.
This is 60 minutes of excavation. We look at your real week — the finances, the grief, the schedule, the thing you keep almost saying — and use that as the actual design brief.
You'll leave with a single clear thread to pull: what's yours to do, what to stop, and why the gap between them has been costing you.
$497 (Includes Zoom session and recording.)
Small Group
A four-month small-group business studio for entrepreneurs building a business that holds their whole life.
You've done the thinking. You know your work has something in it that the usual frameworks can't hold. What you need now is time, company, and someone to help you see it clearly.
Stop deferring your actual life until the business is ready.
The Luminous Studio is a small group — twelve people — working through the actual architecture of a business that fits your whole life. Marketing that sounds like you. Offers that don't require you to perform. A structure you can sustain past the launch.
We meet for four months. The work is slow on purpose. The results aren't.
Substack
Stories and strategy for building a livelihood in an interconnected world.
The Luminous Web is a regular dispatch on business as part of the larger ecology of a life—how we make money, do meaningful work, and stay whole while we're doing it.
I write about marketing and strategy, certainly. That's the practical spine of it.
But the questions underneath the marketing questions are what fascinate me: what building a business asks of you, what growth costs, what it means to build something that holds up in real life instead of an ideal version, what it means to remember we are interconnected.
So alongside the strategy, expect nature. Attention. Creativity. The messy middle bits of life and business. The strange, often unglamorous work of figuring out what you actually believe and building toward it.
Practical, grounded, and occasionally irreverent.
My favorite thing about Carmen is that she shares my ideal of making every customer connection a form of service. It's a style of marketing that puts the customer first.
I can't think of a time I've ever had an hour-long conversation about marketing that left me with happy butterflies instead of just sweaty palms.
The Nature of Grief Coach