The path from battlefield intelligence to healthcare marketing didn’t start with a business plan, but with a boy.
A moment.
A wake-up call I never saw coming…
The desert air hung thick with dust as I made my way through the war-torn school building.
We were following up on intel and meeting with local friendlies.
Another building.
Another mission.
Another day.
This was my third deployment as a combat interpreter.
I’d been running intelligence operations, working with locals, gathering intel, analyzing patterns to protect American lives.
I could observe without absorbing, analyze without attaching.
Emotional distance was a tactical advantage.
Locals were assets or threats.
Buildings were coordinates.
But that carefully conditioned distance shattered the moment I met him.
An eight-year-old boy with eyes that had seen too much sitting cross-legged on a cracked tile floor, twisting wires from a satellite dish with surgical precision.
His hands were steady. Focused.
Like his life depended on it.
“What are you building?”
“English receiver,”
“You speak English well,” I said, genuinely impressed. “Who taught you?”
His eyes finally met mine.
“No one taught. I learn from American movies.”
Something in his matter-of-fact response stopped me cold.
This wasn’t casual entertainment.
The determination in his voice suggested desperation, necessity.
“Why are you learning English?”
His hands stilled.
The silence stretched between us, heavy with unspoken grief.
“If I knew English last year, I could have learned CPR and saved my little sister’s life.”
“Now I learn medicine,” he said. “So my friends don’t lose family like me.”
I turned away, my emotional concealment failing catastrophically. Here I was, an Army soldier turned CIA operative with advanced weapons training and multiple combat tours, fighting to hold back tears, rendered speechless by a child.
This wasn’t my first conversation with civilians caught in the crossfire. As an interpreter, my role was to listen, translate, and deliver the message.
But this little boy pierced straight through. Suddenly, this became personal. All I could think about were my two little sisters at home, how fiercely I’d fight to protect them.
It struck me with unexpected force.
This was devastatingly, unavoidably human.
There in that dusty classroom, the truth I’d been avoiding crashed through my carefully constructed walls: We weren’t winning this war. Not in any way that mattered. Not for this child.
This boy wasn’t seeking retribution.
He was learning medical skills so that no one around him had to die from something preventable ever again.
And it was that love, that empathy, that mission-driven mindset that years later, I saw again in the doctors and healthcare teams I now work with, driven by the kind of loss you never forget.
That night, I lay motionless on my bunk, the ceiling a blank canvas for my thoughts, not something I was familiar with exploring.
The distant sounds of the base faded as clarity washed over me like a wave.
All our fighting, all our sacrifice, what did it matter if this was the result?
My purpose wasn’t here.
Not anymore.
No amount of hazard pay or service medals could balance out what I’d seen in that child’s eyes.
From medals. From intelligence mission briefings. From a “dream job” most people would kill to keep. My co-workers thought I’d lost it. My friends called it reckless. My family questioned my sanity.
But I knew. My mission had changed.
From combat to spreadsheets
I had no plan, but I was not about to wake up every morning asking myself “what if?”
“If I learned 2 new languages and survived three combat deployments, how hard could starting a business be? I’ve faced bullets. Spreadsheets aren’t going to kill me.”
I laugh at that naïveté now. Building a company has tested me in ways combat never did.
In war, there’s no time to overthink.
You move.
You adapt.
You survive.
But behind a desk?
You have time. Time to think, and overthink. Time to pause, revisit, adjust… and that loop can trap you.
I had to learn when analysis became avoidance, when planning became procrastination, and when perfection became the enemy of progress.
Still, I went all in. As a three-time, no award winning, self-proclaimed WordPress developer, I immersed myself in the world of SEO.
And that’s when I built my first company in 2016, Direction – because I’d finally found mine.
I poured everything into it. Sold my house. Emptied my 401k. Maxed out every credit card I could get my hands on.
The early days were chaotic. I was neck-deep in an industry that felt more like a digital dodgeball game than a profession.
Agencies throwing big words, bigger promises, and walking away with client cash while delivering fluff. Vanity metrics. Bloated retainers. Zero accountability.
But I saw the gaps. I saw what could be fixed. So I took any project in any industry I could land just to keep the lights on: real estate, e-comm, SaaS startups, you name it.
And it worked. The business grew. But something felt missing.
It was the patient stories.
And they found them because of us.
One day, I got an email from a client.
A patient had found them through our SEO work.
But now? They had a full life to live and could see their children grow up.
That’s when it hit me. This is it. This was the work that mattered.
Whether in warzones or web browsers, the mission is the same: cut through chaos, extract clarity, and connect the right people with the right solution.
Doctors, dentists, therapists, specialists, they’re not just practitioners.
They’re protectors, leaders, decision-makers in moments that matter most.
They don’t wear body armor; they carry something heavier: the weight of every patient outcome on their shoulders.
But even the best can’t help the patients who never find them.
That’s where Direction comes in, making the invisible visible. Every result we generate isn’t some metric; it’s a moment.
A diagnosis.
A breakthrough.
A chance.
Because behind every click is a heartbeat.
Today, Direction serves providers worldwide. But success isn’t measured in just metrics.
Sometimes I still think about that boy…
Where is he now?
Did he become a doctor?
I’ll likely never know.
But I often wonder about the patients who find our clients…
The parents who stop blaming themselves once they realize it wasn’t their fault, it was a rare condition finally diagnosed.
The average person who finds the right therapist and realizes they’re not alone, not broken, and not out of options.
The family that discovers hope and a future when they thought there was none.
They’ll never know what sparked this journey. They’ll never hear the boy’s voice in that war-torn classroom.
But they’ll feel what he ignited. In the diagnosis that brings answers.
The therapist who makes someone feel human again.
The provider who finally gives someone a path forward.
And it’s in those moments, those behind the scenes, life-changing victories that we find our purpose.
We entered marketing to make that easier.
This is more than a mission. This is our purpose.
Because behind every chart, every scan, every second opinion, is someone searching for hope.
And behind every click that leads them to you, is Direction.
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