You deserve a marketing leader
who gets manufacturing.
Senior marketing leadership for manufacturers. Without the overhead of a full-time executive, and without the misalignment of a traditional agency.
This is probably your story.
You built this company the way most great manufacturers get built: on quality and craftsmanship, on relationships, and on decades of doing right by customers. Growth came from referrals, trade shows, repeat business, and the longtime contacts who knew exactly who to call.
Somewhere along the way, the ground shifted. The contacts who always called are starting to retire, and the engineers replacing them research suppliers on Google and ChatGPT before they ever pick up a phone. The website hasn’t kept up, the quotes live in spreadsheets or somebody’s inbox, and the marketing, when there’s time for it, doesn’t clearly connect to revenue.
So you’ve probably tried an agency already. Most of the owners I meet have. The agency sold a product: SEO, ads, a new website, without ever really understanding how you sell, who buys from you, or how they decide. What you needed was someone to own the marketing function the way your controller owns the books: inside the business, accountable to the numbers, there every week.
That’s the job I do. And how I got here is the reason I can do it.
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 were ignoring. All of that became the practice I run today, and here’s what it means for you: when I sit in your Monday meeting, I already know your world. The trade shows, the distributors, the 18-month quote, the buyer who needs a spec sheet before a phone call. You don’t spend six months teaching me your business. We start working on it in week one.
“I admired a client’s website many years ago and asked him who designed it. That’s when I learned that it was Jay Weeks who did the work and much more for the company. So I called Jay and he’s been helping me and several of my clients for the past 16 years. He’s professional, competent, and on the cutting edge of technology. Most importantly, Jay is a smart, high-integrity results-oriented person and the feedback from my clients he is working with has been the same.”
Steven M. Stroum, Founder of Venmark InternationalBuilt across manufacturing.
Nearly two decades inside and alongside manufacturers, from the shop floor to the boardroom, with client relationships that run five, six, and twelve years.
Industries
Precision machining, optics, electronics, heavy equipment, specialty tools, metal fabrication, battery systems, giftware, furniture manufacturing, and industrial distribution.
Capabilities
Growth strategy, positioning, digital marketing, content and video, HubSpot and CRM, marketing automation, trade show strategy, sales enablement, channel and distributor marketing, and team building.
How I work
Hundreds of marketing experiments run. Repeatable systems built for speed. Every engagement starts with the business itself: the products, the buyers, the channels, the constraints. Strategy comes from the inside out.
Ready to talk?
Start with the free Growth Score to see where your growth engine stands. Or book a call and I’ll tell you exactly what working together looks like.