Aaron joined InterProse in 2017 to build its sales and marketing function after a decade in surgical sales. A self-described jack of all trades, he fills his off-hours with woodworking, backpacking, fly fishing, adventure motorcycling and much more.
I grew up in Tacoma, WA on the east side of town in an economically depressed neighborhood. I attended Stadium High School, which is the high school featured in the '90s film "10 Things I Hate About You."
I attended Washington State University's Murrow School of Communication and graduated with a Bachelor's in Communications and an emphasis in Advertising. I minored in Social Psychology.
Varied. My first job out of college was as a Kayak Guide in the San Juan Islands – probably because I wasn't ready to grow up. My first real job was as a Site Acquisition Specialist for a wireless tower consulting firm where I drove around with a bunch of cell phones from different carriers looking for dead spots that would be good locations for spec towers. I was promoted at that organization to Business Development Manager for the West US and learned a ton about outside sales and customer retention.
When funding was drying up for wireless consulting, I threw my resume into the medical sales vertical at the suggestion of a friend. I landed a role as a Territory Manager for a medical device company in the field of urology and spent the next decade working from home and my car or an airplane or hotel as a traveling surgical sales representative. This was an amazing experience learning every day and I was given surprising latitude to create marketing campaigns and take on additional responsibilities like summarizing and presenting on new published data that the sales team could use or needed to defend against. Once the travel requirements became untenable, I found my way to InterProse and haven't looked back.
I was recruited by my long-time friend, adventuring partner, and now coworker, Greg Johnson. Greg is InterProse's CTO and he asked me to consider a Director of Sales & Marketing role they were planning to create in 2017 because they had finally reached a point in the company's growth that justified the role. I saw tremendous opportunity with a company that had a quality product, an amazing team of collaborators and thinkers, a delightful existing customer base, and surprisingly little market awareness.
This one's gonna take a while. I am perpetually curious and want to know all the things – which means I have a variety of interests that appear unrelated at first glance. The common theme is that there is arcane knowledge associated with every specialty and instead of being content with paying someone else to do something, or just allowing the mystery to remain intact about how something is done, my ADD-saturated brain decides to pursue learning the skill. Now mind you, this makes me a jack of all trades, master of none, but I'm ok with that because I'll keep at something until I'm at least proficient before getting sidetracked by something else.
The most enduring hobbies/interests I have are fitness (weight training and running) and fine woodworking, which my garage would provide physical evidence of the financial and time investments I've made. In addition to these hobbies, I dearly love backpacking, fly fishing, adventure motorcycling, mountain biking, road biking, home improvement (framing, sheetrocking, electrical, plumbing, tiling, flooring, finish carpentry, you name it), portrait painting (not walls – I hate painting walls), cooking, baking, volunteering with my Rotary Club, obsessing over biomarker and health measurements, reading (or more often, listening to books while doing something else), hiking, and traveling with my wife.
Like any customer-facing representative of a service company, I feel like I make the biggest impact as an advocate and consultant for our customers. I try to be relentlessly curious to fully understand a need so I can both guide them on how to get the most out of their service and/or champion their need to the product team so we can provide the solutions necessary to make business more fun for them.