Apiary Foundry / operator-led growth system
The operator who turned off the ads and nobody noticed.
Willie Peacock has spent 15+ years building the systems most marketing teams skip: tracking that survives from click to revenue, campaigns built around economics instead of vibes, and automation that makes execution faster without losing accountability.
He is an attorney, a Chicago Booth MBA candidate, a paid media operator, and the kind of person who installs call centers and lead piping when the bank forgets to build them.
Every page, workflow, and campaign has to produce a decision-ready signal.
The short version
Willie Peacock is an attorney, a Chicago Booth MBA candidate, and a growth operator who has worked across paid media, legal tech, automation, analytics, and high-stakes professional services.
He has turned around bleeding ad accounts, built measurement middleware that made publishers millions, installed call centers and CRM pipelines from scratch, and deployed AI agents to build in two weeks what used to take six months.
He built Apiary Foundry for companies that are tired of marketing motion without marketing accountability.
How this started
Willie was building websites in junior high and using DOS/Windows 3.1 before kindergarten. He studied psychology because he wanted to be closer to people than machines, then scored in the top 1% on his first practice LSAT and went to law school.
He graduated into the Great Recession. No law jobs. He took a 90-day temp gig at Thomson Reuters writing legal content. It turned into two years and over 4,000 blog posts — more than anyone in the site"s history at the time. He also worked on estate planning software and learned SEO, email marketing, and content systems.
When he finally went to practice law, he found he hated litigation. But he had found something better: QDROs — the retirement-division work that family lawyers needed but nobody understood. It was in the weeds, complex, and rewarded efficiency. Most lawyers charged flat fees, so dragging out the billable hour was not an option. You had to work smarter and faster. That combination — high-stakes complexity plus flat-fee pressure — made automation and systems thinking a survival skill.
He never left marketing behind. Even while practicing law, a bigger firm pulled him in as a marketing director and associate attorney simultaneously. By 2016 he was running marketing for a $15 million law firm, merging a network of exact-match microsites into a single master site and bringing on agencies to scale the work.
The paid media years
Military.com: the turnaround
A friend hired Willie to run paid ads for Military.com even though he had never personally managed a budget over $250. The ads were bleeding money so badly that he turned them off and nobody noticed for four months.
He got tracking working, fixed the conversion-value problem, and found a $50-a-month Ukrainian middleware called RedTrack. That middleware connected click IDs to conversion values and sent them back to the ad platforms. Within weeks the account was printing money: roughly $1.40 back for every $1.00 in. They maxed out search impression share, made military recruitment ads profitable, and cross-sold leads across branches.
When COVID hit and Willie was laid off, the company lost money for the next three months. He had already built the data systems he watched the decline from.
The bank: building infrastructure from zero
Next, a bank hired him as a "mini CMO" to launch a VA loan department. When he arrived they had no call center, no lead infrastructure, and no way to route leads to sales. Loan officers were sitting in a room with cell phones calling cold affiliate lists. Nobody was closing anything.
Willie built the entire stack in about six months: call center, lead piping, response workflows, drip campaigns, CRM routing — everything. Then interest rates spiked overnight and the bank shut down the entire division. The infrastructure was solid. The macro environment was not.
UpgradedPoints: 43 profitable months
Willie joined a travel credit card affiliate publisher where the founder was brilliant at SEO but the paid media system was underdeveloped. Willie and the dev team built a RedTrack equivalent in-house — middleware connecting conversion values to transactions and feeding them back to Google Ads.
Two months later they were profitable. They stayed profitable for 43 consecutive months without losing money. They maxed out Google Ads, moved to Meta, and eventually scaled to over $1 million per month in profitable spend. Willie left when the company wanted to relocate the entire marketing team. The 43-month streak ended shortly after.
Why AI changes the game
Willie"s last staff role was at a company he describes charitably. A $6 million marketing budget turned into $50K. The product was not ready. The sales team had nothing to sell. After the budget imploded, he was lent to the company"s staffing division and given a chance to deploy AI agents on a marketing build for the first time.
He built 50+ landing pages, 150+ emails, integrated HubSpot, built data tracking pipelines in N8N, and created a self-booking calendar system — all in two weeks. It took another couple of weeks to debug the tracking pipeline. What used to take six months at the bank now took two weeks, and most of that delay was waiting for humans to review the AI"s work.
That deployment changed everything. Willie realized that the right combination of deterministic systems, agentic execution, and human strategy review could compress execution timelines by an order of magnitude — while still preserving accountability.
That is the foundation of Apiary Foundry.
The operator advantage
Apiary Foundry is founder-led because this kind of work needs taste, judgment, and accountability.
A junior executor can launch assets. A specialist can optimize a channel. A platform rep can recommend spend. A dashboard can display metrics.
The growth system still needs someone asking the hard questions:
- Does this campaign deserve money?
- Can we trust the source data?
- Is the landing page making the right promise?
- Does sales know what to do with the lead?
- Are we optimizing for lead volume or business value?
- Which work is creating learning, pipeline, or revenue?
- Which work is theater?
That is the seat Willie occupies for AF clients: strategist, operator, reviewer, and budget-decision adult in the room.
What working with Willie feels like
AF will push for specificity early:
- Who is the buyer?
- What is the offer?
- What is the unit economics model?
- Which conversion event deserves optimization?
- What data survives the handoff from ad platform to CRM?
- What would make us cut spend?
- What would make us double spend?
The tone is direct because marketing budgets deserve adult supervision.
Work with Apiary Foundry
Stop funding motion. Fund what works.
If the team is busy and the scoreboard is still suspect, bring the system into focus.