Brian’s story / bkba.ltd
Brooklyn. Bobby. Abbey.
Hi, I’m Brian.
bkba.ltd is my freelance marketing practice, but the name is really shorthand for the life I’m choosing on purpose. Brooklyn is where I’m going. Bobby and Abbey are why I stopped assuming I had forever to get there.
01 / Roots
Brooklyn was in the story before I was.
My grandfather was born in Brooklyn to Greek immigrants. My grandmother came there from Puerto Rico as a child. Years later, her mother worked at the Hotel St. George sewing and repairing uniforms while my grandfather worked there as an electrician. She introduced him to her daughter. After serving in the Navy during World War II, he came home and married her 10 days later, on her 21st birthday, at the Brooklyn Municipal Building. They started their family there before eventually making their way to the Midwest.
So yes, the pull toward Brooklyn may be a little inherited. It just took me a while to understand it as my own.
02 / The through line
Marketing was already the through line.
I studied strategic communication at The Ohio State University and spent time doing social media for a website before agency life. At the same time, I was freelancing in event production and realizing I liked the pace, the people and the energy enough to wonder what it could become if I gave it more room. Then 2020 erased live events almost overnight, sent me back to my parents’ house and forced me to get more deliberate about the career, city and life I actually wanted.
So naturally, I moved to New York in the middle of a pandemic. I landed in Brooklyn at one of the strangest possible times to live there and fell in love with it anyway. I felt more awake there: more independent, more ambitious, more like myself.
I eventually left Brooklyn to return to Ohio for graduate school, earning my Master of Science in Marketing from the University of Cincinnati. I left because I was building something, not because Brooklyn felt finished. If anything, the distance made the feeling more precise.
Since then, I’ve built my career across strategy, social, copy, campaigns, email, web, creators, public-sector work and brands ranging from pizza and beer to healthcare and transit. The categories change. The instinct doesn’t: find the signal inside the noise and give people something clear, useful and human.
03 / The part that changed everything
Then life stopped making sense.
In December 2024, one of my best friends, Abbey, died unexpectedly after a sudden cardiac event. Growing up as a closeted gay kid in the Midwest, right in the middle of two brothers, I had always wanted a sister. Abbey became one.
Four months later, in April 2025, Bobby died after being struck by a car. He had been my best friend since third grade and was the first person who ever told me it was OK to be gay. Before I knew how to believe that for myself, he gave me somewhere safe to be me.
Within four months, two people I thought I had decades left with were gone. I kept coming back to the same phrase, partly as a question and partly because grief can make language feel absurdly inadequate: make it make sense.
It didn’t. It still doesn’t. There is no elegant explanation that makes two young lives ending that close together feel acceptable. But the phrase stayed with me because I realized how much of my own life I had filed under eventually: Brooklyn eventually. The right job eventually. Love eventually. A bigger life eventually.
After Bobby and Abbey, eventually stopped sounding patient and started sounding dangerous. I cannot make losing them make sense, but I can decide what I do with the life I still have. Somewhere in that, I finally had language for the work I had already been doing for years, too: take something complicated, overworked, underexplained or not quite there and find the clarity inside it.
04 / Why this exists
I stopped treating later like a plan.
Brooklyn is where part of my family story began and where I want the next part of mine to happen. I want the right full-time marketing opportunity in New York and a real life there again: work I care about, people I love, a neighborhood that feels like mine and, if we’re being slightly romantic about it, I have a fairly strong suspicion the love of my life is not waiting for me in Ohio.
Getting there takes applications, networking, interviews, conversations and the willingness to keep showing up in one of the most competitive job markets in the country. bkba.ltd gives me the flexibility to keep doing good work while making room for that pursuit.
I’m not asking anyone to work with me because something terrible happened. The work still has to earn its place. But losing Bobby and Abbey changed the urgency with which I choose the work, the people and the life I’m willing to wait for. They taught me that love is not background scenery; the people we get to love are the life. I still sometimes think of myself as having three lives to make proud: theirs and mine.
05 / The work
The professional version is simpler.
Give me the campaign without the idea, the copy that isn’t landing, the content system nobody has time to untangle or the brand that knows what it means but not how to say it. I can shape strategy, write, concept, manage social and creators, build email or web copy, support digital work and use AI to make the process faster without making the work feel like AI.
I ask questions. I learn quickly. I challenge things when they can be better. I care about the human being on the other side of the message. If we work together, I want the result to be clearer, sharper and more useful than where it started. That’s the professional version of make it make sense.
The personal version is why this business exists at all: life is short, Brooklyn is calling and I’d rather build the next chapter than keep talking about it. There are places to return to, people still to meet and work worth doing.