I didn't find this work.
I looked back and realized
I'd been doing it all along.

I spent over 15 years in sales — including door-to-door work for Nielsen, where I wasn't selling a product so much as selling an idea to strangers who didn't want to open the door. What worked wasn't a script. It was honesty. Leading with the truth, even when it cost me the sale, built more trust than any technique ever could.

But selling for other companies — products and services I couldn't fully get behind — was never fulfilling. I tried other things. Music production. PC repair. Each one had something, but none of it fit the way it needed to.

What I didn't notice until much later was the pattern. Every side project I ever started, the thing I spent the most time on wasn't the product or the service. It was the brand. The name had to mean something. The logo had to fit. The identity had to be more than window dressing. I just didn't realize that was a skill — or that it had a name.

My father runs Treun Technologies — an IT security firm serving financial institutions. When he was building it, I got involved in naming the company. I found the Gaelic word for strong and sturdy, and immediately understood that bank clients need to feel trust and authority before anything else. The entire identity was built backward from that insight. Treun Technologies is still in use today.

Around the same time, my wife Sarah was building Dei Amor — a natural candle company. I diagnosed a pricing and positioning problem she didn't know she had. She was selling premium-quality candles at generic prices, presenting a luxury product like it was an everyday one. I repositioned the brand, helped name it — Dei Amor, meaning God's Love in Italian and Latin — and pushed her to move upmarket to reflect what she was actually making.

Neither one felt like work. Both felt like something I was supposed to be doing. That realization became Toviyah.

I'm a husband to my wife and a father to two girls. My wife and I are both full-time students, and she homeschools our daughters — which means our home is full, loud, and exactly the way we want it. We all spend a lot of time together, and that's not a sacrifice. That's the point.

I'm a US Army veteran who served in Iraq. That experience shaped how I think about commitment, honesty, and showing up for people who are counting on you. Those things don't leave you.

My faith is central to who I am and why I do this work. Toviyah means God is Good in Hebrew — Tov meaning good, Yah meaning God. It's a personal declaration I carry into every client relationship. I help people because I feel called to, not just because it pays.

I won't take money from someone I can't genuinely help. That's not a positioning statement. It's just who I am.

I don't have a waiting room full of clients. Every person I work with gets my full attention — not because I promise it, but because the math is simply different. Fewer clients means more of me for each one.

I'm not going to impress you with industry jargon or a polished sales deck. I'm going to ask you honest questions, listen carefully to what you say and what you don't, and tell you what I actually think — even if it's not what you were hoping to hear.

Some of the best conversations I've had with clients started the moment I stopped talking like a consultant and started talking like a person. That's the only way I know how to do this work.