I have spent my career figuring out how to make things work better.

The career behind the work I do today

My career started long before generative AI. I have been a small business owner for 31 years.

I have worked across marketing leadership, healthcare, technology business development, business ownership, media, digital strategy, communications, websites, CRM, sales support and day-to-day operational problem solving. That includes three years of institutional marketing at Lansing Community College and approximately three years inside IT and application development businesses, working directly alongside developers and technical leadership. The habit is the same in every one of them: understand the business problem first, then decide what to build.

From 2017 to 2024 I was Director of Marketing and Events for Orthopaedic Rehab Specialists, a physical therapy practice that grew from six clinics to twelve locations during my seven years leading marketing and events. Two of those clinics opened in late 2020, which meant building the marketing for “we are open, we are clean, we are safe” while the rest of the world was still working out what safe meant. That teaches you to communicate clearly when the people around you are uncertain.

I have run my own businesses continuously since 1995, when Three Men and a Tenor, the group I helped form in 1992, became a full-time professional act and Grayling Filler Productions was formed to operate the business. The Impression Professionals carried my agency work for more than a decade before I retired it in 2024, the same year Mark Stiles Marketing began. The same pattern showed up elsewhere. I was a performing member, co-owner and President of Grayling Filler Productions until it dissolved in January 2025. It was succeeded that same month by Three Men and a Tenor, LLC, where I am still a co-owner. Twice now, one chapter closed as the next opened and the business never stopped running.

What AI changed

When generative AI became useful, I did what I have always done with new technology. I learned it by putting it to work, starting with ChatGPT in 2023 and expanding into Claude and additional AI, automation and production tools in early 2026. Today I use those tools to research, design, build, test, document and improve business systems. I know where AI speeds up the work, where human judgment still matters, and where adding AI would just add complexity.

Roughly three years into that work, I have built and operated three distinct sales and marketing ecosystems with these tools. AI did not teach me how businesses work. It gave me new tools for work I already understood.

In front of the room

I am comfortable leading, collaborating and speaking in front of a room, not just working behind a keyboard. I walked a skeptical audience of roughly 50 sales executives through the CRM audit, the score and the fix at a Washtenaw Business Association event. Earlier, with Grayling Filler Productions, I helped raise $60,000 for a nationally aired Detroit Public Television concert special that won an Emmy for Best Live Shots, and personally raised $30,000 across two overseas tours performing for U.S. troops: 23 shows in Germany in 2004 and 38 more in 2006, including Landstuhl Hospital both times.

Titles matter less to me than the work getting done. I will research, write, build, evaluate, organize, train, document, coordinate and troubleshoot, and I am as comfortable setting the strategy as I am executing it.