Proof
Twenty years apart. The same instinct.
See the problem. Build the platform that should already exist. Do the work, then leave it running without you. Here are two, twenty years apart.
Proof
See the problem. Build the platform that should already exist. Do the work, then leave it running without you. Here are two, twenty years apart.
Priest Holmes was the most productive running back in the NFL and one of its most marketable names. He was also coming off an injury, facing a contract renegotiation, and dependent on a media apparatus he did not control. There was no Instagram, no Twitter, no YouTube. ESPN owned the audience, the league owned the highlights, and the team's PR office owned the recovery narrative, which gave the team every reason to manage his value down before they negotiated. He hired me to build him out of that box.
The gap was the audience. Own the relationship with the fans directly, and the league and the media no longer control access to it. Put a brand on top of the athlete, and the deals stop rising and falling with his weekly snap count. None of that infrastructure existed for an athlete in 2002. So I built it, in a window of months, ran it until it stood on its own, and left. Almost everything below happened inside that same short stretch.
The build
Every endorsement, every piece of merchandise, the website, and the wrapped truck were Team Priest's. Priest was the founding asset inside the brand, not the product on top of it. That one decision is what let everything else stand on its own.
I built the website as the spine of the whole operation: a training-camp diary, streaming workout video, full merchandise commerce, and Kid Priest content, a direct-to-fan platform three years before YouTube existed. When Priest came off injury and the standard play was to let the team's PR office manage his value down, I put streaming video of him pulling a tractor on a site he owned, in front of fans, sponsors, the Chiefs' front office, and every other team at once. The injury narrative collapsed. He renegotiated coming off that injury and signed a deal that did not reflect one, then set the single-season touchdown record that year. The win was positioning, not a number.
Five national partners, Papa John's, Reebok, Pepsi, Sprint, and Coca-Cola, every deal structured so it did not rise or fall with a snap count, a holdout, or a contract year. The brand threw off deal flow that did not depend on how the season went.
I designed the apparel and the storefront myself, and the line did close to a million dollars in nine months through Walmart. The wrapped truck ran as a moving billboard across Texas and Missouri, then I licensed the same truck as a toy onto the Walmart shelf, so a child who saw it on the highway owned it two weeks later. The road and the shelf, one design.
Organizers paid Team Priest to appear at their events, and Priest almost never did. The truck showed up. The merchandise table showed up. The brand showed up, and the organizer paid full freight. That is the rarest line in athlete branding: the brand had detached from the athlete as the thing being sold.
Kid Priest ran as an animated character with commercials on Comcast and coloring books in Kansas City and Houston daycares, and Team Priest Kids sponsored local plays and concerts, so the platform put equity back into two cities under one name. I ran all of it in sync with the Chiefs, not against them. When Sports Illustrated called me for a feature on the strategy, I declined and pointed them back to the team, and that is why the Chiefs gave Team Priest access no other player's outside group got, including a season-long, Coca-Cola-anchored tailgate at Arrowhead.
A speaking program Priest and I built and delivered together, radio takeovers that lifted listenership, and a sit-down series where Priest interviewed the journalists who had written him down, on the record. Different channels, same engagement, same handful of months.
What it produced
All of it inside one short, finite engagement: a brand that earned independent of the score, close to a million dollars in merchandise in nine months, a renegotiation won coming off injury, a record season, and community equity in two cities. Then I left, and the model held without me, the truest test of the work. A template the rest of pro sports kept borrowing.
Dine-in stopped, the relief programs were a maze, and the national chains had the scale to absorb the shock. The independents did not. Black-owned restaurants in Houston, mostly family operations one or two locations deep and chronically underfunded long before the pandemic, were first on the closing end of the curve. Business leaders in the city asked me to build something before that whole stratum disappeared. I said yes.
I started the Houston Black Owned Restaurants Group and built it as a community, not a marketing list. Members joined to find places to eat. The restaurants joined because the members wanted to find them. The fit proved itself in real time: within weeks, member traffic ran ahead of the kitchens, and operations that had been weeks from closing were turning customers away because the line was too long.
Three moves
The group reached seventy-five thousand members in the first few months and a hundred and fifty thousand at full scale, with sustained traffic to more than three hundred restaurants. Demand ran so far ahead of the kitchens that operators weeks from closing were selling out and turning people away. Those three hundred stayed open while comparable independents across the city closed. The platform did not market the restaurants. It carried them.
Members kept naming the same frustration: Houston's food trucks ran unreliable hours in scattered lots, and you ate standing in the sun. Every park in the market was designed around the operator. So in 2021 I opened Houston Grub Park and built every decision around the customer. Online ordering at every truck, so no lines. A buzzer system like a sit-down restaurant. Covered seating, table attendants, trash the park carried, and hours strict enough that a truck arriving late did not get in. Reliability became the brand. Trucks averaged twenty-eight hundred dollars a week, and the run put roughly two and a half million dollars through the vendors.
When the press came, I did not take the interviews. The owners did. They had built the businesses on the lot, so the visibility belonged to them. It is the same discipline that ran through Team Priest twenty years earlier: the platform exists to elevate the people whose work it is, and the principal stays out of the frame. I have turned down five years of interview requests about this work for the same reason.
Still compounding
The park's first run closed when the landowner sold the property in 2022, and a larger second park is in build now. The community never depended on it, so it kept going. In 2024 I renamed the platform Black Houston, because the conversation inside it had grown past food into culture, business, and ownership, and the name needed to match what it had become.
Today Black Houston is a paid content partner of the Houston Chronicle, which pays to reach the audience this work built starting in 2020. Five years in, still building.
Your business
Two cases, twenty years apart, the same instinct: see the problem, build the platform that should already exist, and leave it running. I take a few clients at a time, by reference, and every message reaches me directly.
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