Ezra Drake

Legion Express Laundromat · Hope Mills, NC

• Open the shop four days a week. Cleaning, floor standards, customer service, wash-dry-fold intake, pickup and delivery. Trained on the machines; now handle preventive maintenance and repairs across an 81-machine floor.
• Built a live revenue dashboard. The card system and the point-of-sale had never been reconciled against each other. I merged them and shipped a self-serve report broken out by service line, with period projections and growth targets.
• Built a maintenance logging application. Cloudflare Pages, Workers, and D1. Any attendant logs a machine fault in seconds, repairs and hours are tracked in the same place, and vendor service requests generate in one click.
• Built a unified customer record. The loyalty platform and the point-of-sale each held half of every customer and could not see each other. One search box now spans name, phone, email, and card swipe, with consent captured at the counter.
• Wrote the brand guide and rebuilt the website. Identity system, palette drawn from the building itself, typography, voice, photography direction. Site rebuilt and migrated to Cloudflare.
• Ran a customer cohort analysis. Found a single retention cliff at the first order — a customer who reaches a third order is worth roughly nine times a one-and-done. Used it to redesign the discount so it buys customers past that one point instead of discounting indiscriminately.
• Modelled equipment replacement. Pulled per-machine usage and revenue the card system does not expose by default, found the largest washers earn several times what the smallest do per machine, and priced four replacement scenarios for the owner.

Figures behind the last two are the owner's confidential data. I can walk through method and findings, not raw numbers.

Rebel-Builder LLC

• Independent operator. Marketing, software, brand strategy, and content for small clients and my own products.
• Building an ambient AI assistant and an operating-system framework for people who would rather run their own lives than be managed.

FreedomFest · national liberty conference

• Owned marketing for an annual national conference — $1–2M in revenue, 1,500–2,000+ attendees, and 200–250+ speakers. Hired part-time, promoted to full-time.
• Built the Galaxy Era marketing system — a complete strategy and operating framework that replaced the generic inbound model with one purpose-built for the event. Documented as a 900-line interactive manual with a swimlane timeline and a revenue model.
• Designed a five-track email engine: 38 mapped emails across VIP ascension, member nurture, exhibitor and speaker outreach, brand journal, and pricing urgency. Built on a list history of 540 campaigns and 4.87M sends.
• Served as the central editorial filter for all organizational messaging — every public-facing word ran through me.
• Led a cross-functional team of five — developers, designers, and content producers — and ran a nine-page website rebuild.
• Created the FF26 design system and the Think Independent brand journal, from concept through copy and design direction.
• Rebuilt the whole workflow around AI tooling, which is where the current work started.

Return on Ideas · strategic consulting

• Campaign strategy and execution for clients across the ideas and education sector.

Ayn Rand Institute

• Marketing operations for a nationally prominent educational nonprofit — brand, donor engagement, and content distribution.
• Recruited and onboarded the developer I had worked with previously, and have continued working with since.

Foundation for Economic Education

• Campaign execution and content production for one of the oldest free-market education organizations in the country. Started as an intern, promoted to salaried, later retained as a remote contractor.

The Objective Standard

• First role out of the military. Redesigned the organization's entire web presence and ran marketing for a nationally distributed quarterly journal — teaching myself web design and digital marketing from scratch to do it.

United States Air Force · Seymour Johnson AFB

• Six years maintaining fighter aircraft under a documentation system where an unsigned inspection grounds the jet. It is why I am comfortable on a laundromat floor with a multimeter in my hand.
• I left the kinetic war to join the philosophic one — the argument about values that shapes everything downstream. Everything after this is the same job in different clothes.