Why I Walked Away From 15 Years in Marketing

Three weeks before I sat down with Jared Orr on the Arizona Business Podcast, I sold my marketing and systems agency. Fifteen years of my life, gone in a signature. Email logins, calendars, Dropbox folders, client files, all of it handed off. It was heavy. It was also the most liberating thing I've done in a decade.

I never planned on running an entertainment company. Ten years ago I was doing thirty-minute luau shows, cultural storytelling with some fire spinning mixed in. Simple, clean, connected to my heritage. At the same time I was running the agency full time, building CRMs, automating back-end workflows, running email campaigns for other people's businesses. That agency paid the bills, especially in winter when entertainment work dried up. I was building systems for everyone else and had no capacity left to build my own.

Then one summer we booked over a hundred shows. That was the moment I knew the fire work wasn't a side hustle anymore. I'd been treating it like an afterthought, and it had already become the main event.

For years I ran both businesses at once. Up at four in the morning for client work, then performer mode by night. I did that for a decade before I hit a wall. If you've ever tried to do it all, you know the feeling. Your brain stops working the way it used to. Nothing feels good anymore, not even the parts you love.

Selling the agency wasn't an easy call. But once it was done, I had one focus: Hana Events + Experiences, a cultural experience design studio built around fire, dance, story, and sensory detail. That's the work I was built to do. We're not just spinning poi or throwing fire. We're building something people carry with them after the show ends. When it lands right, people don't ask what we do. They feel it.

We started in Utah and Arizona. Now we've got performers in eleven states, and we're building into Denver and Florida. We don't need to fly a full crew to every job anymore, we've built a real network, which makes us faster and more cost-efficient without losing the quality. The priority hasn't moved though: time with my family, and projects that actually matter.