After years of helping organizations tell their stories, I decided it was time to build something of my own.

Lens With Benefits became a place where everything I’d learned could exist under one roof: strategic communications, reputation management, photography, web design, visual identity, and writing all pointing to the same question:

What’s your story?

Today I work directly with organizations and individuals to help answer that question. Sometimes, the solution is a communications strategy. Sometimes, it’s a website. Sometimes, it’s a portrait. Sometimes, it’s a podcast. More often than not, it’s simply helping someone see their own story clearly enough to tell it with confidence.

I’m still building. More importantly, I’m still paying attention.

When the world finally settled into something resembling normal, I found myself in one of America’s oldest institutions. 

In higher education, my work became less about producing communication and more about shaping the systems behind it. I helped modernize digital governance, improve accessibility, develop executive communications, and build financial publications that prioritized understanding over accounting jargon.

Much of the work happened quietly; preparing leaders for conversations before they happened, advising on sensitive issues before they became public, helping departments communicate consistently across an institution measured less in employees than in communities.

I realized something during those years. Sometimes, the best communications work is often invisible. If it’s done well, people rarely notice the strategy. They simply understand what needed to be understood.

At the time: not much changed. The books kept accumulating, the camera kept traveling, and my fiancée patiently accepted that our garage would always have room for one more project.

Few things in life have woken me up like the sinking reality of a global pandemic.

Almost overnight, communications shifted from supporting organizations to helping them navigate uncertainty itself. At Direct Development, I built the agency’s PR and Crisis Communications function, developing the processes, strategies, and discipline that would guide our work long after the pandemic subsided.

The work quickly expanded beyond crisis response. I advised municipalities, healthcare providers, nonprofits, and private organizations, helping each communicate through rapidly changing circumstances while maintaining public confidence. There are dozens of stories from those years. Building a crisis function. Coordinating messaging across healthcare systems and local governments. Returning clients to a more sustainable communications cadence. They’ll eventually become Dispatches of their own.

Personally, I discovered that road trips make for surprisingly good therapy. Over sixteen months I drove more than 100,000 miles across 38 states, spending long hours thinking about communication, leadership, and how a person can drive over the same hill in Wyoming for 130 miles straight.

At the time: classic films, whiskey, kayaking, telescopes, astrophotography, road trips, and convincing myself that learning the saxophone was a reasonable pandemic hobby.

Politics continued to pull at my attention while writing became my creative outlet. Eventually, the two collided.

I studied journalism believing it would become my career, and for a while it did. I learned quickly that I loved reporting more than the industry itself. Deadlines and editorial agendas interested me far less than understanding people and explaining complicated ideas clearly.

That realization led me in unexpected directions. A political campaign became my first communications leadership role. An IT consulting firm taught me that infrastructure wasn’t limited to buildings and bridges. 

At some point, I realized I was less interested in writing stories than helping shape them.

At the time: politics, long-form journalism, website design, movies, and discovering The West Wing.

The confluence of political and geopolitical events after Y2K had a lasting effect on me. For example, despite growing up in Florida during the 2000 election, the most intense protesting I ever saw was in the fight for Terri Schiavo. Witnessing and growing up in the midst of one of the great moral dilemmas is still one of the most fascinating and lasting experiences of my life. 

But, nothing impacted me as much as the post-9/11 world. In the days that followed, and at 9 years old, I was no longer watching my favorite TV shows or channels. I followed the news every day after school, from the launch of Operation Enduring Freedom until I was 12-years old and I’d discovered my new church: The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. 

From these and participating in my first canvassing events for the 2004 presidential election, my worldview was forever shifted. 

Spending every weekday from 2004 to 2007 inside a law office after school probably played a role, too.

At the time: US politics and news reporting, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, UK’s Top Gear, Scrubs, staying outside, and annual trips to the New York Auto Show. Discovered photography.