When Trent joined Nood as Head of Paid Media, there was an existing operating model in place but it was built on unclear metric definitions, inconsistent data sources, and layered assumptions that made it unreliable. The result was significant deltas between the marketing forecast and month-end close with finance, making it difficult to trust the numbers or make confident spend decisions.

Trent rebuilt the model from scratch with clearly defined and forecasted metrics, starting at the most granular level and rolling up through every component of the business from COGS and taxes to merchant fees, shipping, and returns. This level of detail meant the team could pinpoint exactly where forecast and actuals diverged rather than guessing at the source of discrepancies. The model was built across both new and returning customers, with Bear, Base, and Bull scenarios that gave leadership a clear range of outcomes tied to different spend levels.

The model was bottoms up by design, laddering directly to the company's financial goals and giving the team a daily read on how they were pacing against forecast and exactly where adjustments needed to be made. Beyond marketing, it also supported inventory planning by providing demand visibility across product lines. It played a direct role in helping nearly double contribution margin percentage year over year.

When Trent joined Rebalance Health as Director of Growth, creative production was happening without a structured strategy behind it. Trent built the creative engine from the ground up, starting with a strategic framework organized around core dimensions like offer, angle, and audience, then layering in additional variables including content type, awareness level, emotional tone, and placement. Every piece of creative was mapped against these dimensions, ensuring the team was systematically testing and iterating rather than producing ads based on intuition.

He then built the measurement layer on top of this framework, tracking spend and performance across every dimension so the team could see exactly which combinations were driving results and which were fatiguing. The goal was to create incremental spend opportunities by unlocking new offers, audiences, and angles, with a tight feedback loop between creative and paid so that performance data directly informed the next round of briefs.

Trent also established clear measurement of creative partners, tracking output quality and cost per creative produced to ensure the team was getting consistent value from external resources. Winning offers and angles were fed into a landing page development process in collaboration with an agency partner, ensuring the post-click experience matched the pre-click messaging.

When Trent was promoted to manager at CTC, the paid social department had 7 paid social buyers and was facing a retention challenge common across the industry at the time as the post-COVID ecommerce boom drove intense competition for media buying talent.

Rather than accept the revolving door, Trent built a clear career pathing roadmap with increased earning and bonus opportunities at each level, collaborating with HR and cross-functional departments to create lateral movement options for media buyers looking to grow beyond their current roles. By the time he was promoted to Director, the department had scaled to 5 managers each overseeing 3 to 5 direct reports.

Beyond headcount, Trent operationalized the entire department by building a process that delivered consistent media buying strategy across 50+ accounts, developing standardized training and onboarding programs that reduced ramp time for new hires, and creating the frameworks that allowed the team to maintain quality at scale. The result was a department that could retain talent, develop careers, and deliver consistent performance across a massive portfolio of DTC brands.