JD John Desjardins
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John Desjardins
Open to select leadership and advisory opportunities.

Growth is a system. I build the system.

Growth Executive · Marketing Systems · AI Transformation · Digital Strategy

20+ years building companies, revenue systems and marketing organizations — from startup growth to enterprise operations and AI-driven business transformation.

Leadership · Fractional · Advisory · Select Projects
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I read these myself
Skills
The story

I've already sat in the seat you're hiring for.

It started on the acquisition desk — media budgets, attribution, and a number that had to land every month. That grew into running global performance marketing, and building a category leader from nothing. Now it's AI systems — the audit first, the build second.

Four companies of my own later, the pattern hasn't changed. The strategy is rarely the problem. The system underneath it is.

John Desjardins
Los Angeles, California
CLARITY

A direction the whole team can act on by Monday.

SYSTEMS

Data, cadence, and automation that hold without me in the room.

OWNERSHIP

Someone accountable for the number every single week.

The companies

Five companies. One standard.

Software, agency, telehealth, wellness, lifestyle. The industry changes; the way they're built doesn't.

Enterprise AI · Systems Build
FLYBRN
Founder

We audit how a company actually operates, design the system it should be running on, and build it in their environment. Their accounts, their cloud, their code.

Operating audits and systems build
Every claim carries one The evidence key
VERIFIED A named record, export or filing
ESTIMATE Our assumption, method stated
UNVERIFIED Needs a document or a call
Nobody else in the category shows their own uncertainty.
Agency
Silicon Beach Web
Founder & Managing Director

A white-glove design, marketing and development agency — sites, systems, brand, and the campaigns behind them.

Design · Marketing · Development
Lifestyle
Skinny Lyfe
Founder · Launching soon

Weight Watchers for the future — community and accountability, wrapped in education, reviews and a shapewear storefront. It’s also the front door to 20Science.

Community · Education · Commerce
Telehealth
20Science
Founding Partner · Launching soon

Physician-guided weight loss and hormone therapy, built on the protocols and pricing transparency the category usually hides.

Telehealth · GLP-1 · Care ops
Sexual wellness
Throbbs
Founder

A 12,000-product wellness catalog with the merchandising, content and fulfillment engine behind it — plus LibidoDrops, our own product line.

Ecommerce · Catalog · Content
Work with me

It starts with an audit.

Most of what I am hired for now is enterprise AI and the diagnostic that comes before it. Sometimes the answer is AI. Often it is not — and knowing the difference is most of the value.

Strategy is me. Build is my team at Silicon Beach Web. FLYBRN, the software behind a lot of this thinking, ships soon.

Start a conversation
01

AI architecture

The system design before the spend — what to automate, what to leave alone, what it costs to run at volume, and the honest case for doing none of it.

02

Business audit

Ninety days of your real data against your org chart and your P&L. I find the actual constraint, not the one everyone is already arguing about.

03

AI build & implementation

Delivered with my team at Silicon Beach Web when you need hands, not just a deck — agents, internal tooling, data plumbing, and the change management around it.

04

Fractional & interim executive

CMO, CGO, or Head of Growth — part-time, with full accountability for the number.

05

Advisory & board seats

Ongoing counsel on growth, AI strategy, and market expansion — for founders and the funds behind them.

06

Full-time executive

For the right company and the right mandate, all the way in. I have held the seat before.

Proof

What the systems actually did.

No timeline, no logo parade. Outcomes I was accountable for, built the same way I build an AI system now — diagnose first, then ship.

Where

Operating seats and advisory work — what I owned, and what it moved.

Bally's
Sr. Director, Omni Channel Marketing · 2022–2023
Led teams and budgets. Worked with the offline casinos to activate our online products — bridging brick-and-mortar to online, and rewards.
Monkey Knife Fight
Sr. Director, Acquisition & Operations · 2019–2023
There from inception, and wore every hat. Acquisition, retention, operations, built their ecommerce, and worked with the product team on the software that aligned marketing, paid, HubSpot, email and offline activations.
Sharp.App
Fractional CTO / CRO · ongoing
Rebuilt their apps, their operations — the entire business, really. Equity as a founder.
WINDAILY
Acting CMO · 2024–2025
Rebuilt the older business.

"I'd rather be judged on what still works a year after I've gone. Build the system, hand it to someone who owns it, and leave the company better at the thing than it was before I showed up."

John Desjardins signature
Insights

What I'm actually seeing.

Working notes on enterprise AI, the audits that come before it, and the parts nobody puts in the case study.

Get these by email
Next release AI business audits Coming with the next release

The AI audit: what I look at before anyone writes code.

Ninety days of your real data against your org chart and your P&L — and the four questions that surface the actual constraint. Sometimes the answer is AI. Often it isn’t.

Read it
AI operations Coming with the next release

AI operations: the part nobody budgets for.

Models are the cheap part. Running them at volume, with someone accountable when they’re wrong, is the expensive part.

AI software Coming with the next release

AI software: build vs. buy, and the only three questions that matter.

Most teams answer this on price. Price is the least predictive of the three.

AI automation Coming with the next release

Automate the process, not the person.

How most of one company’s support tickets turned out to be a handful of unanswered questions — and why hiring an agent to answer them would have been the wrong fix.

Field Notes

One teardown a week. Nothing else.

A real problem I hit that week, what I actually did about it, and the number it moved. No roundups, no recycled LinkedIn posts, no selling.

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Before you go — where AI actually pays off.

I've shipped AI into real P&Ls and watched most of it fail. This is the one-pager I give founders before they spend a dollar on it.

The four places it reliably returns, with the numbers I’ve seen
The three that burn budget and look impressive doing it
What to build vs. buy at under $50M revenue
No list. One email, then nothing.
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Check your inbox in a minute. Reply to it if you want to talk through your own case — that reply comes straight to me.