Shawn Burrell

Thirty years building revenue organizations in new markets — opened Austin for Clipper Magazine, set a 14-year monthly revenue record at Community Impact, delivered 120% year-over-year growth across ten markets at Granite Media — then, through a structured AI mentorship, became a builder. Designed, shipped, and now operate a production enterprise SaaS platform solo, licensed under a 12-month agreement with SLA obligations. I direct AI agent teams under governance — separate surfaces with separate permissions, a read-first gate, rules enforced in the repository, nothing closed on an agent's word — and I create, operate, and install the AI sales-enablement workflows that run on them. Looking for a senior role where AI operations, platform engineering, and revenue leadership intersect — the three halves of what I actually do.

• Governed agent teams. Coordination (plan, scope, draft), Execution (code, migrations, deploys), and Background (overnight audits, scheduled jobs) run as separate surfaces with separate permissions. Routing work between them is the architecture; the model vendor is interchangeable.
• Read-first gate. Execution agents cannot see coordination context, so every change is gated on reading the canonical standards first and verifying against the documented contract before anything is proposed.
• Rules in the repo, not in prompts. ~70 operational rules captured from real incidents — data-safety, dedup and idempotency contracts, deploy conventions — enforced as standing repository instructions that every new session inherits.
• Verification over self-report. No task closes on an agent's claim. Completion means browser and database verification against production, logged to audit tables.
• Business method in the loop. The same discipline runs revenue: an outbound methodology I created (HIT-AIM™), layered into an AI workflow, operated by me on live pipelines and installed in client sales teams — measured by stranger-to-engaged conversion, not activity.

• Delivered MaineCoastLife.com solo in 12 weeks across three phases — live at week 8: event ingestion, directory, editorial CMS, newsletter automation, identity resolution, 37-zone ad server, ticketing.
• Selected by a licensee with deep industry standing — a former GateHouse Media vice president and former evvnt board chair — who expanded the agreement by amendment (fleet 20 → 30 venues, SLA with 2-hour critical response, through May 2027) and separately retained me as fractional revenue operator.
• Security posture: 47 Row Level Security policies, PKCE auth with self-registration disabled, OWASP ZAP 0 failures / 58 passes, secret scanning clean across 223+ commits, third-party audit Grade A, isolated preview branches, 30-day backups with point-in-time recovery.
• Newsletter at 52.8% open / 5.3% click against 3,700+ subscribers (Omeda H1 2026 publisher benchmark 31.6% / 1.16%); 150K+ ad impressions; 2,600+ ticketed events served.
• SpecBuilder AI: 220 users and 2,100+ page views in its first 10 days, no paid promotion; users in four countries, syndication reaching Hong Kong. ICP Lead Finder: deterministic, versioned-rubric lead scoring — 447 leads sourced and scored across 33 cost-ledgered searches for $1.23 in total data spend, zero records invented; Google Places sourcing with an LLM confined to outreach drafting only.

SB Digital Solutions (operating brand of NRM) · Austin, TX · Remote

• Designed and ran "The 90-Day Build": 29 prospects, 53 touches, 6 playbook iterations, 9 reusable assets — 17.2% of cold prospects engaged by a qualified decision maker within 16 days (published cold-outbound reply benchmarks: 1–3% average, 10–15% top tier). Now offered as AI Sales Operations.
• Install the method in client sales teams and train them to run it without me — the test of whether a workflow is real.

Next Revolution Media, LLC (NRM) — platform development and licensing · Leander, TX · Remote

• Own and license the IP for a production enterprise SaaS platform; sole engineer and operator under contract with SLA obligations to a paying enterprise licensee.
• Stack: Postgres with Row Level Security, 23 edge functions (Deno/TypeScript), cron, React SPA, environment-gated CDN deploys, GA4/GTM/GSC, AdSense/Ad Manager, Resend.
• Run a 30-venue scraper fleet under a strict idempotency contract (hash-based dedup, normalize → enrich pipeline, quality gates, dormant-season handling, retry automation); health surfaced in an in-house admin console.
• Scope classification and contract work under the licensing agreement — in-fee vs. separately scoped, amendments, consultant NDAs, controlled access provisioning. Products: Control Center, SpecBuilder AI, ICP Lead Finder.

Zoe Marketing & Communications — digital and programmatic marketing agency · Birmingham, MI · Remote

• Tripled pipeline using data-informed outreach and retargeting; introduced a consultative sales model that improved close rate by 25%.
• Built an ROI framework through risk analysis — identified the sales thresholds required per channel before spend.
• Developed outbound playbooks for legal, home-services, and SMB sectors — the work where the AI-enhanced sales workflow that became HIT-AIM™ first took shape.

Granite Media Partners, Inc. · Taylor, TX

• Directed sales across 10 markets and a 30-person consultant salesforce in a multi-product media ecosystem; 85% salesforce retention.
• Delivered 120% year-over-year growth and a 15-point profit-margin increase; exceeded annual revenue targets by seven figures; wrote the playbooks used for national expansion.
• Installed Pipedrive company-wide with performance dashboards, and drove incremental revenue by marketing to the existing customer base through automated, segmented sends.

Community Impact · Pflugerville, TX

Promoted through four roles — Sales Specialist → General Manager → Senior Sales Director — leading enterprise client strategy and regional growth.

• Set the all-time monthly revenue record — a 14-year company high, still unbroken.
• Launched a new product line across 18 territories, exceeding targets by 60%.
• As GM, transformed the bottom-ranked region into #1 company-wide; #1 individual performer four consecutive years.
• Drove 35% year-over-year revenue growth across 500+ clients with 85% retention.

Clipper Magazine · Austin, TX

Built and scaled territories from zero across competitive Texas markets during the print-to-digital transformation.

• Opened the Austin market from the ground up, exceeding year-one targets by 50%; built a territory from scratch to 200% growth and the #1 regional ranking.
• Led the Dallas region to top revenue-producing status in Texas; developed and coached teams that consistently surpassed quota.
• Promoted to Regional Sales Manager on sustained performance.

• Structured AI mentorship, 2025 — six-month AI Development & Business Integrations program with Guy Tasaka (LMA Innovator of the Year; senior media-industry AI practitioner): weekly recorded sessions with assigned build work. Began from an open offer he made to a conference room of media executives; I took it, followed through, and shipped. He later introduced me to the publisher who became my first licensee and vouched for the build.
• Self-directed engineering stack, 2025–2026 — Postgres/RLS, Deno/TypeScript edge functions, React, Python, Git, email deliverability, cron, multi-agent orchestration — each learned by shipping it to production and operating it under SLA.
• Security practice — OWASP ZAP, secret scanning, third-party audit, and database security-advisor remediation adopted as standing release gates; cleared a production RLS/security-definer advisory to zero findings.

AI & Workflow: multi-agent operating models, rules engineering and safety gates, AI-assisted software development, workflow analysis and process design, requirements-to-spec generation, evaluation by verification.

Engineering & Security: PostgreSQL, Row Level Security, serverless edge functions (Deno/TypeScript), React, Python, Git, REST APIs, cron, scrape → normalize → enrich pipelines, PKCE/OAuth, secret management, environment isolation, backup/PITR, access provisioning.

Revenue & Business: new-market launch, GTM strategy, B2B sales leadership, revenue operations, CRM implementation (Pipedrive), platform licensing and SLA management, contract negotiation, scope classification, analytics (GA4/GTM/GSC).