The first thing I ever sold was arms and ammunition. I was a boy behind my parents’ counter in Johannesburg and I learned my trade by watching. When a thing broke, my father sent for no one. He took it apart while we looked on, and the next time it broke, we took it apart ourselves. The creed was simple: Be present. Know your goods. When they fail, the failure is yours.
I have founded a few companies in the years since. The one I run now is called Portside, and its business is the selling of the outdoor life on behalf of those who make it: the builders of boats, the owners of climbing gyms, the merchants of adventure sport goods. Many agencies will swear they understand their clients. I market only the things I know or want to know.
I was not born to the water. I bought my first vessel in the year 2020 and told myself that I would learn to sail her. Five years on, I hold a license to command vessels of a hundred tons, which will tell you something of how I go about learning. It is the same obsession that has carried me up mountains, under the wing of a paraglider, and down long roads by motorcycle through country where no signal reaches. Seek out the thing that punishes carelessness. Then cease to be careless.
It is how I run my companies.
Portside is a performance marketing agency based in San Diego and with a toe in the waters of Fort Lauderdale. We run Google and Meta advertising, build the pages people land on, and set up the tracking that shows which customers came from where.
Our clients make their living outdoors and on the water: climbing gyms, sailmaker, boat builders and charter companies, and a handful of businesses outside that world, including veterinary surgery and solar installers, who hired us because we measure what we do.
Our first client is still with us since we started in 2022.
Patrick advises Portside on strategy. He has spent sixteen years building marketing systems for software, ecommerce and experience brands: the CRM, the automation, the reporting, and the full-funnel programs that sit on top of them. At Portside he is the second opinion on positioning, campaign planning and growth modelling, and the person Grant calls when a problem needs an outside eye.
Off the clock he lives the same life as the clients. He is a certified sailor, a paragliding pilot, has supported scientific missions in Antarctica, and has summited Mt. Whitney and Vinicunca.