Trained by Google: James moved from print into the newspaper group's digital department, where he was trained by Google in how online advertising really works.

Barcelona, 2015: He went to work with Facebook and with AdRoll, one of the largest retargeting platforms on the web, and worked his way up to manager.

The platforms, from the inside: That decade taught him how the big advertising machines actually run, knowledge most local agencies only see from the outside.

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In 2017 James moved to Whistler and began building the client list that became Echo Digital. The pitch was simple: proper, platform-level marketing for local, owner-run businesses, delivered by someone who had done it at the biggest scale. The clients came, and they stayed.

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Local, done properly: Small businesses got the kind of marketing usually reserved for companies with far bigger budgets.

Trust over years: Clients handed us their marketing and kept us, which is where the next chapter came from.

A base to build on: Years of running their marketing meant we understood their businesses well enough to build more.

What happened next was not a strategy to chase AI. Clients we had served for years started asking for more. Build us the website we own. Build the portal. Build the tool that handles this job. We kept saying yes, and one build at a time, we became the team that runs their systems, not just their ads.

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They asked for platforms: Websites, booking, portals and e-sign, so we learned to build and host them.

They asked for operations: The daily work itself, so we built the systems and the AI to run it, human-approved.

They asked us to stay: Now we are their whole digital and operations partner, not a marketing line item.

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