I've run my own businesses since 2010. I have lived it.

In March 2020 I locked the door of my frozen yogurt shop, the business I had run for a decade, and I didn't know it was for the last time.

I grew up watching my parents grind through landscaping jobs in the fields, day after day. The work took everything they had. Marketing was never in the cards, not because it didn't matter, but because there was nothing left in the tank at the end of a day like that.

In 2010 I opened a storefront of my own and found out what my parents had always known. Running a business eats every hour you give it. I wore all the hats: sales, service, hiring, the books. And after midnight, the marketing. That's where I honed the craft, because nobody was coming to do it for me.

When the pandemic took the shop, I went to the other side. I spent years inside a marketing agency with clients across the country, and I did not sit in one seat. SEO, paid ads, operations, every corner of digital marketing ran through my hands. That is where it clicked: I finally saw how the work actually gets done, what is worth paying for, and what is theater. I had been on the paying end of that theater for a decade.

A decade of owning a business with nobody to copy teaches you one thing above all: how to see the opportunity other people walk right past, and how to connect the dots when there is no playbook. That is the skill I bring to every client. Not a template. A pair of eyes trained to find where your growth is hiding.

Ember exists because I want to help these companies grow the way somebody should have helped my parents, and me. I know what a booked job is worth. I know what a wasted marketing dollar costs. I have lived both.

· Binh Huynh, Founder