For most of my career, growth looked like a spreadsheet: sell-through rates, rep territories, a brand landing its first national account. These days, growth also looks like a person across from me, working through grief or a hard season. Different scale, same instinct — help something, or someone, get from stuck to strong.

If you’re wondering how the pieces below fit together: I’m really three things — a consultant, a counselor, and a philanthropist.

The consultant side goes back almost twenty years — starting on the assembly line of my family’s manufacturing business, then a stretch in healthcare administration at UNC Health, before I found my way back into the gift industry as a territory rep and worked up through sales management at Creative Brands. As Vice President of Sales at MarketTime, I helped drive a 780% growth year that put the company on the Inc. 5000. Gift Shop magazine named me to its 40 Under 40 along the way.

I’m the co-founder of MC Nexus (mcnexus.co), where my partner Camille Claire and I bring over 30 years of combined experience to help wholesale brands in the gift, toy, and home industries build sales strategy that actually holds up. In the last twelve months alone, we’ve managed ten brands, driven more than $1M in sales, and activated 300+ reps across 14 rep agencies — plus shown up on three industry podcasts (including an episode of Rooted In Retail) and a handful of webinars. I also sit on the membership committee for the Gift & Home Trade Association. Growth comes from serving — our clients, their teams, and the bigger vision behind both.

At the same time, I’m finishing a Master’s in Clinical Mental Health Counseling at Liberty University, graduating in May 2027, and currently seeing clients as a supervised counseling intern. I came to this the long way, through the same two decades above: a boss who inspired me and one who broke me, corporate politics, the tug between what a job demands and what a family needs, and losing people close to me to the parts of life that go unspoken. I’m a Psychological First Aid and SYMBIS-certified facilitator on top of the clinical training. If you’re looking for counseling, you can read more and reach me through Let’s Figure It Out Counseling (letsfigureitoutcounseling.com/landon).

Serving shows up outside both of those rooms, too. I’ve been on the board of Gift For Life — the gift industry’s own charitable arm — since 2022, and now serve as Vice Chair after a term as 2nd Vice Chair. Founded in 1992 to stand with the industry through the AIDS crisis, it’s raised nearly $6 million for that cause and, more recently, over $100,000 for hunger relief alongside World Central Kitchen. If that’s something you want to put a few dollars behind, you can give at donate.wck.org/fundraiser/6857456.

None of that is where I started, though. Long before spreadsheets or supervised hours, I was a writer — poetry and short fiction, and I still write both, just as leisure now rather than a career. Most of what I wrote in that earlier season has been retired here, but Vapors, a short thriller, stays up as the one piece worth keeping.

These days the work shows up in three rooms instead of one — a strategy session with a wholesale brand, a counseling session with someone rebuilding, or a Gift For Life meeting about who needs help next. Different work. Same question underneath: what does this person, or this business, actually need in order to grow?