About Josh

My first real job was working as a painter for my dad's painting company. Technically my first paycheck came earlier: on my eighth birthday, he had me on a jobsite scrubbing paint buckets so I could fund my own birthday cash. Very normal child-labor-themed character development.

Later, he offloaded a lot of the business side to me, which is where I first learned the roots of GTM engineering: websites, CRM management, accounting, estimating, sales, and the delicate art of getting my dad to approve the Craigslist post he had me working on since midnight.

That mix shaped how I think about systems. A repaint isn't sold in a funnel chart. It's sold through estimates, timing, trust, follow-up, jobsite reality, and whether the person doing the work understands what was promised. There's no harder system to design than one for people who are already carrying ladders, answering customers, and trying to beat the rain while pretending the process was definitely followed. If it only works for someone sitting quietly at a laptop, it isn't done yet.

After that I kept widening the aperture, from SEO and digital campaigns for small businesses into full go-to-market operations. In 2017 I founded Elevado MKTG, a bilingual consultancy for small and mid-sized companies. A lot of the work was with local community businesses: websites, CRM setup, marketing automation, enablement, and the unglamorous operational pieces that let a small team look more put together than it had any right to. I also used the services side as a way to help launch small businesses through nonprofit work. Eventually that turned into deeper Salesforce and Infusionsoft builds, and full-stack GTM for teams that needed a revenue-ops function but couldn't staff a whole department.

Then my wife got pregnant, and I discovered that "nonprofit agency founder" isn't technically a health insurance plan. Corporate suddenly had a certain charm.

I've been at Lucidworks since 2021. I started in marketing operations and grew into Senior Manager of GTM Operations. Today I run the systems enterprise companies rely on to turn GTM motion into something measurable: Salesforce, Marketo, HubSpot, Gong, Outreach, Nooks, Apollo, n8n, Notion, Make, enrichment tools, AI tools, and everything in between. Some days that's lifecycle architecture and handoff rules. Some days it's Apex, SOQL, Python, SQL, React, or Next.js, because the vendor tool doesn't quite fit the job. Some days it's figuring out how to make the monthly Sales and Marketing sync useful enough that people stop quietly hoping it gets canceled.

My bias is to build when building is the right call, and to buy when it isn't. I've replaced tools that weren't worth the renewal, built account-health and forecast scoring, wired AI into CRM context, and shipped systems that make messy GTM work easier to act on. This site is where I write about that judgment: the space between what platforms ship and what teams actually need, and how to close it.

I'm a self-taught engineer because I like building things. It's the most creative part of the work for me: taking a problem everyone has learned to route around and turning it into a system that just works. I've got a hard time accepting "it can't be done" when the real answer is usually closer to "we haven't built it yet." I've picked up plenty of certifications along the way, but the credential I trust most is a system that has run in production long enough that people forgot it used to be a problem.

Away from the keyboard, you'll usually find me somewhere in the Northwest wilderness with my wife, our kids, and our dog Bella. When I'm not out there, I'm probably playing guitar, running a stoplight concert in the car, or unwinding with a good video game. I speak English and Spanish, know my way around a cha-cha and a tango, and will use almost any excuse to crash a carne asada.

Contact

The best way to reach me is by email at josh@gtmjosh.com, or on LinkedIn.