Manufacturers deserve a marketing leader
who gets manufacturing.

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I didn’t start in marketing.
I started on the road.

My career started as an outside sales rep for five furniture manufacturers. I drove to customers, carried the samples, walked the trade show floors, made the cold calls, and sat across from buyers trying to earn their business. I sold millions of dollars of product. And I discovered something unexpected along the way. It wasn’t the selling that captivated me. It was the making. People who build real things, solve real problems, and turn raw materials into something the world needs.

Those years taught me things no marketing textbook could. How manufacturers think. What a trade show looks like from the exhibitor’s side. How marketing, sales, and distribution have to connect, and how rarely they do. I learned what moves a buyer to act, because I was the one on the phone trying to make it happen. When I eventually took over the marketing function at the rep firm, building the website and the digital presence and helping open a showroom, I realized that was where the leverage lived.

In 2011, I started working directly with manufacturers. My first client made metal giftware. Trophies, medals, enamelware, silverware. Beautiful products, minimal marketing. A story I’d hear over and over in the years that followed. In 2013, I became a HubSpot partner and started building the systems that are still the foundation of everything I do today.

Back then, most manufacturers didn’t understand digital. They came from trade shows, catalogs, and word of mouth, and I helped them make the transition. Websites, ads, content, video. Strategy alongside their marketing directors. One engagement at a time, I built a practice around manufacturers who needed someone to own the marketing function, not just execute tasks.

Along the way, I hired outside agencies on behalf of my clients, and I watched the same pattern every time. The agency started from the product they could sell, not the result the client needed. I wanted to work differently. Understand the business first. Put the client’s interests at the center. Build marketing that actually drives growth.

Since then I’ve worked across precision manufacturing: optics, electronics, heavy equipment, specialty tools, battery packs for critical applications. Hundreds of marketing experiments. Repeatable systems built for speed. And a working knowledge of how manufacturers actually sell, through direct teams, distributors, reps, and the digital channels most of them were ignoring. That experience became Jay Weeks. Not an agency. Not a consultant who shows up with a slide deck and disappears. A fractional marketing executive who sits inside your business, understands your market, and builds the growth engine you’ve been missing.