Experience

Golden Rule is a family-run plumbing, heating, and air company based in Des Moines, with additional offices in Omaha and Salt Lake City. Neum joined as Director of Marketing in August 2026 to lead the marketing team across all three offices.

The mandate combines team leadership with hands-on AI implementation. It is day one, so the results are still ahead. The goal is practical: build systems that help the company market more effectively and grow faster without turning AI into theater.

The work at Cove was end-to-end ownership of the performance side: paid media, organic search, creative output, and the systems around them. The biggest operational change early on was pulling ad operations in from an external agency and scaling creative production by a wide margin. Neum ran several channels directly and coordinated outside contractors on others.

The accomplishment he points to first is a goal he set in his first months on the job: averaging 100 sales per day. At the time, Cove was doing 20 to 30 per day on average, with triple digits only showing up on Black Friday and a handful of peak holidays. Leadership told him the goal wasn’t realistic. Last year, Cove averaged 100+ sales per day across five separate months.

Neum wrapped up his time at Cove in June 2026 after more than three years with the company. He left with a clearer view of the performance role he does best: direct ownership, measurable outcomes, and room to build the systems behind the marketing.

The introduction to Cove was the downstream effect of a long relationship. Stephen Tippets and Neum’s friendship goes back to 2008, when Stephen came home from an LDS mission looking for work and wanting to learn to code. Neum was running Pageworthy full-time. He handed Stephen his first coding books, taught him HTML and CSS, and brought him into client projects as his first real development work.

Stephen took it, ran with it, and by Neum’s own honest assessment became a significantly better developer than Neum is today. When Cove needed marketing help years later, Stephen was the one who knew Neum could do the job.

The Digital Marketing Manager role was the runway. Nine months of demonstrating what could happen on the performance side, then the CMO promotion in January 2024.

Stephen and Neum have developed a methodology for weaving modern AI tooling into real marketing work. The clients who fit well have clear decision-making and an appetite for AI-native systems.

Having a real partner in Stephen is what makes Stacked different from Pageworthy’s side-project years. With someone else in the room invested in pushing the business forward, Neum is for the first time running an operating vehicle that isn’t just a spillover from full-time employment. Pageworthy’s clients have migrated to Stacked; the Pageworthy website now redirects there.

Bureaucratic companies, resistance to change, and committee-driven cultures aren’t good fits for Stacked, and the agency is honest about that. For specifics on current results or whether Stacked would work for a particular business, Neum prefers a direct conversation at neum@stackedagency.com.

The honest version: Pageworthy typically ran $50K to $100K a year in revenue, with Neum as the sole operator and occasional help (including his nephew, learning to code). He was expert at growing other people’s businesses and never cracked the code on growing his own the same way, because he was always too busy executing on client work to build Pageworthy into a real agency. That self-knowledge, more than any specific project, is the reason Stacked Agency exists now and takes the shape it does.

The 2008 to 2010 recession hit Pageworthy hard. A lot of clients went under. Neum and his family short-sold the house they had built and moved into their rental property. Pageworthy survived on word-of-mouth referrals and continued for nearly two decades after that, through every subsequent life phase, the Nebraska years, the China years, the pandemic, and the eventual migration to Stacked.

A couple of Pageworthy projects still stand out. The Orbit Baby shopping cart, built around 2007, let customers assemble a modular car seat and stroller system in Django, with products that could be added to a floating cart, images that rotated on hover, and animated drop-into-cart transitions. Ambitious for the time. And there is a longtime client who has stayed from the earliest years of Pageworthy through four full website rebuilds and nearly 20 years of the relationship. That kind of retention says more than any testimonial.

After returning from China, the family settled in Lincoln, Nebraska, where Neum’s son was finishing high school. The Department of Education contract was steady full-time dev work while Neum was also rebuilding Pageworthy’s client base on the side. The combination made it one of his stronger income periods.

The motivation was his oldest daughter: her senior year of high school. The younger two daughters had been in Chinese immersion for years and spoke some Chinese already. It was the one window to do this together as a family before she left for college.

Neum had not yet finished the last few classes for his degree, which meant he could not get a Chinese work visa. His wife, who has a marketing degree from University of Washington, went in on a visa as an English teacher. Pageworthy stayed running on a small client base back home, including a longtime client who had already been with Neum for close to a decade at that point and is still a client today.

The family came back to the US for Christmas 2019. The pandemic broke out weeks later. Their Chinese visas were revoked soon after, and they did not return.

It was hard and beautiful at the same time. Neum’s family did something genuinely unusual together. He doesn’t speak fluent Chinese, remembers only a few phrases, and regrets none of it. His daughter wrote most of a travel blog during the trip. Ask him to send you the link.

When Neum joined, there were about five sales guys working out of an upstairs office above a plumbing business. By the time he left, the team had grown to roughly 60 sales people in a much bigger building. The growth was Facebook-led with an omnichannel layer underneath, and the team was fun and fast-moving.

One of his ads got syndicated on Pandora. One of the owners heard it on his own commute in and came into the office blown away. A small thing, but the kind of moment that tells you the creative is landing with real people, not just dashboards.

Neum raised some concerns internally about cost-per-lead economics, though he wasn’t given backend visibility to fully work through the numbers. The business went through changes around the same time Neum and his family moved to China, and his relationship with Fundwise naturally wound down from there.

The organic traffic doubling deserves a footnote. A meaningful portion of it came from Micro Focus acquiring smaller companies and redirecting their traffic. Neum had to fight to get those redirects done properly, mapping URLs to matching pages rather than simply shutting acquired sites down. His technical SEO and content strategy contributed, but he won’t claim all of the growth.

The AdWords lead tripling was cleaner work and stands up on its own. The SUSE Linux website he helped develop also won a Web Award.

This was a useful chapter for learning how he wants to work. When Neum could talk to decision-makers directly, things moved well; when work stalled in approval chains, the impact shrank. His preference since has been smaller companies or nimble teams inside larger ones, because that is where he can make a bigger impact and interact with a decision-maker directly. Plenty of large organizations have teams that operate that way; it is not about size so much as pace.

The biggest technical accomplishment was a unified product database that replaced three separate data sets. The migration itself was painful work, but it enabled real-time inventory updates on the main site, a dealer portal with live stock visibility, and dealer-specific pricing in the backend.

E-commerce moved from Magento to a custom Django site that synced with Sage 100, the company’s finance software. Alongside that, Neum modernized the dev workflow with Vagrant, Git, Sass, and automated deployment scripts, and built on-demand PDF and CSV exports for product sheets and catalogs. He also built ALDlocator.com on Django and PostGIS with a custom Google Maps integration. (That site was rebuilt around 2017 by someone else and hasn’t been updated since; the version currently on the live web is not Neum’s.)

After a management change, the new team pivoted away from the systems Neum had built and moved the work to an external agency. He left shortly after. Not a bitter exit, just a business decision that changed what the role was.

The long-tail content strategy covered every decent-sized general aviation airport in the country. Local weather, runway counts, city information, celebrity charter flights (the Neymar flight to Brazil, with jet specs, was a standout post). Hundreds to thousands of pages of content across the site, all pointed at real search intent.

The organic flow was steady: 2 to 3 quality inbound leads per day with zero ad spend. For a jet charter business where a single booking can be significant revenue, those were strong economics.

The company sold about a year in. The new owners’ business was primarily medical helicopter maintenance, with jet charter as a small side division. The long-tail strategy did not fit the new company’s shape, so the role did not fit either, and Neum moved on. The work was working; the business situation changed.

On the paid side, the biggest lever was tighter AdWords account structure and keyword economics. Neum cut spend roughly in half while maintaining the same sales volume.

On the e-commerce side, the company sold a few distinct brands at different price points, so he oversaw the build of multiple sites targeted at specific market segments, including a B2B-focused site aimed at contractors selling the high-end brand. He also integrated Fishbowl inventory with the e-commerce stack, which at the time was not trivial.

RBI Inc. made custom silicone bracelets during the Livestrong-era craze. Neum joined in July 2005 as the solo marketer under the CTO, working alongside a team of three developers. Within six months he had the site ranking #1 on Google for most of their organic search terms. That change alone drove over $1M per month in revenue.

He also ran the company’s AdWords account, cutting spend 40% while doubling sales. It caught Google’s attention: RBI was one of Google’s top advertisers at the time, spending close to six figures a month. Google’s AdWords team interviewed him about his approach. He still has the paper document from that interview somewhere.

This is also where Neum taught himself web development. The CTO showed him PHP includes for building landing pages. Then, in 2007, he discovered Django through a designer in the Django community building fast, content-focused sites. He picked up CSS from books and a college class where the professor had never used CSS (and didn’t learn much in it as a result). He introduced Subversion to the dev team after reading a book about it. The first deployment with Subversion broke, and he discovered the hard way that ‘rolling back’ was not as simple as the book made it sound. He tells the story openly; it is the kind of thing that separates people who have shipped software from people who have only read about it.

The company spun off a new brand during his tenure: iFrogz, which started as custom silicone iPod cases, expanded to iPhone cases, and eventually moved into headphones. He helped launch it. In 2008 Neum left to go independent with Pageworthy. He had profit-sharing that would have been worth several million dollars when iFrogz sold a few years later. He walked away from it. Looking back, he treats this as one of the worst decisions of his career: partly ego, partly not understanding that the real growth was in the team he was leaving, not in the independence he thought he was getting. He is a skilled marketer who was not yet a shrewd businessman, and knowing that about himself has shaped his business decisions since.

Graduated from Renton Technical College in 2001 with an associate’s in electronics and networking, straight into the dot-com bust. Marketing jobs weren’t available yet, so he leaned on sales skills he had picked up during an LDS mission and spent three years running sales teams: door-to-door alarm sales, garbage service sales. Formative, if unglamorous.

It taught him more about business than any classroom did. The comfort with small-team management, with performance metrics, with being the person on the hook for a number, all of it has carried through every role since. He is not defensive about this chapter. Sales is good training for marketing.