David Nadler
Operator, fractional COO and CMO, based in Des Moines, Iowa
I've spent twenty years building and running businesses, my own and other people's. I came up through performance marketing before moving into the executive seat. For the last four years I ran the operational and marketing layer of a seven-figure education company. Before that, I was President of one of the most established names in direct response marketing. I'm available for a small number of engagements with founders who want senior operator capacity alongside them.
Why I work from Iowa
For the last fifteen years, my work has been remote. Some of that time running a marketing agency from Des Moines serving founders all over the country. Some of it in executive seats inside companies based in places that weren't Iowa. The arrangement was always the same: do meaningful work for businesses anywhere, while keeping Iowa as home base. That's what lets me be present for my family, rooted in the place I've always been from, and still doing the kind of work I want to do.
The work itself is operations and marketing leadership. I run the operational and marketing function alongside the founder. Systems, team, launches, vendors, financial visibility, marketing strategy, and increasingly the AI infrastructure that makes a small team produce at the scale of a much larger one.
Twenty years, three industries, one pattern
In 2005, I bought a LearningRx franchise here in Des Moines. Cognitive training for kids, two locations, eight years. I sold the business in 2013 and started Automate & Convert, a boutique marketing agency.
For the next seven years, A&C was the work. I built conversion infrastructure for forty-plus founder-led businesses across the country. Marketing funnels, automated webinars, paid traffic systems, lead nurture, course platforms, live event flows. Peak roster of twelve to fifteen concurrent clients with a small core team and contractors. My brother John Nadler helped run the technical and creative side of A&C through most of those years and remains my go-to technical partner today. The client roster included Perry Marshall, Christian Mickelsen, Scott Keffer, Drew McLellan, Dan Schwartz, Eric Moeller, Mitch Matthews, Adam Carroll, Heather Van Vorous, William Appelgate, and others. I owned the operator seat on Mitch Matthews' Coach Mindset for ten years, built and run as a nights-and-weekends project, certifying thousands of coaches worldwide. Two long-running revenue-share engagements with Drew McLellan's Agency Management Institute and the Iowa Chronic Care Consortium, six to seven years each.
In the middle of the agency years, in 2016, I took my first inside-a-company executive role at Self Publishing School. I ran operations through a fast-growth phase, then took on product development. It was the first time I ran the inside of a company instead of building infrastructure from outside it. The agency kept running while I was there.
In 2020, Perry Marshall, who had been referring clients to my agency for years, brought me in as President of his company. I held that seat for two and a half years through the post-COVID contraction in the info-product space. Team of six to seven full-time plus vendors. Twelve to eighteen launches a year. Revenue held steady through a period that hit most companies in the category hard.
In 2022, I joined Dr. Karen Parker at Quantum Human Design as her operations and marketing lead. Four years building the operational and marketing function for a seven-figure education business, including the AI adoption work that's now central to how I run any engagement.
Automate & Convert has stayed my company the entire time. Today it's where I do fractional COO and CMO work for founders, and where I install AI infrastructure for small teams.
The through line
For the last fifteen years, my work has been remote. Some of that time running a marketing agency from Des Moines serving founders all over the country. Some of it in executive seats inside companies based in places that weren't Iowa. The arrangement was always the same: do meaningful work for businesses anywhere, while keeping Iowa as home base. That's what lets me be present for my family, rooted in the place I've always been from, and still doing the kind of work I want to do.
The work itself is operations and marketing leadership. I run the operational and marketing function alongside the founder. Systems, team, launches, vendors, financial visibility, marketing strategy, and increasingly the AI infrastructure that makes a small team produce at the scale of a much larger one.
Talk to me
If you're a founder who could use a senior operator alongside you, the next step is a thirty-minute conversation.
You can also find me on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/dnadler