A wanderer from the start.
I was born in Oakland, California, fearless and endlessly curious, the kind of kid who was always looking for what was around the next corner. I started hustling young: reselling candy around my grandmother's neighborhood, flipping Pokémon cards at school. By high school I had a landscaping business and a crew of neighborhood kids I'd hired myself. Swinging a shovel in the California sun, I learned the lesson that still drives me, that real work, done well, compounds into real growth.
I thought I'd be a doctor.
At UC Santa Barbara I took the long route. I arrived certain I'd become a doctor, until organic chemistry made it clear my talents pointed somewhere else, toward business strategy and the craft of getting people to care. By my junior year I'd earned my real estate license.
Selling homes as a twenty-year-old was humbling. Nobody wanted to buy a house from a kid. So I flipped the problem: instead of selling houses, I'd help agents sell them. I started Realtors Resource, a real estate marketing business, and showed up for established agents with coffee, donuts, business cards, and the digital strategy they didn't have yet. The phone started ringing, and before long a top team at Berkshire Hathaway recruited me into their Montecito office.
I learned to build with a team.
Next, a marketing agency called ZeeBlu recruited me to be a strategist for local Santa Barbara businesses, everything from banks and retailers to restaurants and real estate brokerages. It was where my digital strategy grew up. I learned to think bigger, to delegate, handing projects to an internal team of videographers, photographers, and SEO experts, and I learned as much from them as they did from me. The best work, I came to understand, comes from a team that trusts each other.
A one-way flight, a few thousand dollars, and grit.
Before college I'd visited New York and made myself a quiet promise: one day I'd live there and find out what I was really made of. So I did. I took a one-way flight east with a few thousand dollars from a recent estate sale and nothing to fall back on but resolve. New York is where I sharpened the edge. At AppCard, a next-generation loyalty platform, I founded and led the company's enterprise sales team, hiring the reps, building the playbook, and training the people who would carry it. It taught me that winning on the biggest stage isn't a solo act. You build a team that wins with you.
I built a brand the world noticed.
When I went vegan, I couldn't find clean oral care I trusted, so I made my own. Smile Natural Products began on my kitchen table and grew into something real: over half a million dollars in annual revenue, a retail space in Los Angeles, features in Cosmopolitan, Intuit, and Black Enterprise, and the brand's name up on a billboard. I learned every part of building a company by building this one, from the product to the supply chain to the story that made people pick it up.
Plant-based, sustainable hygiene, for a cause
Then I helped others do the same.
After Smile, other founders started asking how I'd pulled it off. So I began doing for them what I'd done for myself. Through my firm, Citrine Consultants, I helped small business owners sharpen their brand, modernize their marketing, and build the systems to scale, turning hard-won lessons into other people's growth. That is when it clicked: what I love most isn't any single company, it's the building itself, and the people I get to build alongside.
When the work became bigger than me.
Success only counts if you bring people with you, so I built giving back into the business from day one. I donated an entire month of Smile's sales to fund school supplies for 100 families in Brooklyn's Lois Pink Houses. I brought supplies and oral care to students in Newark, sponsored a coding event with Microsoft for the nonprofit Black Girls Can, and partnered with GoodRx to offer free dental scans to the South Central Los Angeles community. And when the pandemic forced me to close my Los Angeles store, I watched other minority-owned businesses fight to survive, so I cofounded Our Piece of the Pie, a community market that gave Black and brown entrepreneurs a place to keep selling when everything else had shut down.
The same instincts, inside a giant.
Then I wanted to know whether the instincts held up at scale. At Eagle Eye I worked with Albertsons' leadership and cross-functional teams to integrate personalized marketing into their Oracle ERP, the engine behind the "for U" platform, work that helped lift national sales by more than five percent. A kitchen-table brand and a billion-dollar grocer, it turned out, ask the very same question: do you truly understand the person on the other side?
The road kept teaching me.
Through all of it, I kept moving. More than twenty countries across five continents, each one quietly reshaping how I think about brand and belonging. The way people gather and buy in Cape Town is not the way they do in Los Angeles, and learning to notice the difference is where my instincts come from. Curiosity is the most underrated business skill I have, and the road keeps it sharp.
The wanderer came home.
Eventually I came back to where it started. I returned to the Bay Area, became the founding sales representative at Vori in 2024, and in 2026 launched Mays Growth Partners, with a mission to revitalize businesses across the Bay Area and beyond. I'm a husband and father first now, building a life as deliberately as I've built everything else. The work continues at Mays Growth Partners. The story behind it is right here.
