Joe co-founded Gorilla 76 with Jon Franko in 2006 and leads business development for the agency. Over the past 20 years, he has advised the owners, presidents and marketing leaders of hundreds of American manufacturing companies. Those conversations shape how the agency thinks about what actually drives industrial growth.
Joe hosts The Manufacturing Executive, a podcast about growth strategy for manufacturing leaders that has published more than 300 episodes since launching in 2020, and has appeared as a guest on other industry shows including MakingChips. He is also a co-founder of the Industrial Marketing Summit, an annual conference in Austin, Texas that has attracted more than 300 industrial marketers in each of the past two years, and the creator of the Industrial Marketing Collective, a private community of more than 300 marketers working inside manufacturing companies. He is a two-time speaker (2024 and 2025) at MTForecast, the annual market outlook conference hosted by AMT – The Association For Manufacturing Technology.
These days Joe is focused on how AI is changing the way industrial buyers research and choose the companies they work with. Buyers who once started with Google now ask tools like ChatGPT and Claude who to trust. Joe works alongside Gorilla 76's clients to understand what it takes to become a company those tools cite and recommend. He shares what he's learning on The Manufacturing Executive and on LinkedIn, where more than 11,000 people follow his work on industrial marketing.
Joe is a Milwaukee native who now calls St. Louis home. He earned dual degrees in business and art from Washington University in St. Louis. Early in his career, he was named to the St. Louis Business Journal's 30 Under 30 class in 2011.
Outside of work, Joe enjoys cooking, cheering on the Green Bay Packers and spending as much time as he can with his wife Julie and their three kids — Grace, Jack and Charlie.
