Selected examples span Justin’s time (2018 - 2026) as a performance-based consultant with mission-driven nonprofits (HeadCount, HBCU Heroes, APLA Health, Thriving Forward Project), and as contracted advisor to Maine Child Therapy Center/ Brave Mighty Minds, through Purpose & Vision Consultancy, and as an in-house executive at Participant Media: SoulPancake / National Domestic Workers Alliance, and Crisis Text Line.
AI-Powered Volunteer Training Simulation (2026)
The Context: Through Founder AI Enablement with Thriving Forward Project, P&V identified an operational bottleneck through discovery with TFP leadership: volunteer onboarding for sensitive confidence and career development workshops was repetitive, time-intensive, and had no way to gauge readiness before placing volunteers with residents. High turnover meant the team was personally re-training every new cohort.
What P&V proposed & built: An AI simulation where volunteers practice facilitating TFP's "You Better Work!" career workshop with a realistic AI participant: a guarded 21-year-old transitional housing resident who tests sincerity, responds to pronoun usage, and opens up only when met with genuine empathy. After the session, a separate AI evaluator scores performance across six dimensions with feedback citing the volunteer's actual responses. Iterated across multiple drafts with the team before pilot deployment.
What it solved: Gave the leadership team a measurable readiness gate (who is prepared to assist workshops, who needs more training) without being in the room for every cycle. Replaced a manual, repetitive process with a scalable, consistent standard.
How it was built: Justin is not a developer. He used Claude to ship the application, provisioned API access from the Anthropic Console, and deployed publicly on Vercel under his own account. P&V remains sole operator on the production environment.
Stack: React, Claude API, dual-prompt architecture, Vercel. Built for approximately $7,000, operating at approximately $20 per month. Phase 2 (Resend email auto-send of completed assessments to TFP leadership) scoped.
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Closing and Adoption on a Modern AI Stack
(2023-2026)
Full Sales Cycle Ownership Plus Quarterly Executive Reviews, AI-Powered Projects Sold to Non-Technical Buyers Across Tech, Media, Retail, Entertainment, Beauty, and Healthcare.
The Context: Two AI-powered products: a real-time analytics layer surfacing ML-generated insights from de-identified crisis conversation data, and a category-first ML research product that mapped proprietary NLP analysis against public health datasets. Buyers were CMOs, VPs of Social Impact, and Heads of Foundation, many of whom had no framework for buying AI.
The Sale: Sold the output of AI, not the wrapper around it.
Databricks insights layer behind a white-label crisis platform. Quarterly executive reviews where Justin translated ML-surfaced trends into messaging, budget, and audience decisions for non-technical buyers like HBO, Maybelline, KFC Foundation, Netflix, and Univision Foundation.
Advised diverse business units (from Marketing, Social Impact, Trust & Safety, and External Affairs), effectively bridging gaps in technical knowledge.
Retained multi-year committed agreements where Justin converted usage-tied funding instincts into platform-level commitments, preserving recurring revenue stability while delivering the texter-volume data partners used to validate renewal.
ML-powered research product forPediatric Associates
NLP conversation data layered with HRSA (Health Resources and Services Administration) shortage-area datasets to map county-level crisis against provider gaps. Category-creation sale; no one at the organization had sold this before.
Sold the AI roadmap on every renewal (ML triage, generative AI counselor-training simulator, LLM translation) to non-technical buyers, navigating de-identification, encryption, and IRB (Institutional Review Board) on every deal.
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Selling SaaS as a Go-to-Market Channel and Becoming the Platform’s Reference Customer
(2021-2024)
2021/2022 Virtual Career Workshops, HBCU Heroes + Visit.org + Dozens of Partners
The Context: Visit.org operates a B2B SaaS subscription platform giving enterprise employers curated access to social impact experiences for their employees. As a strategic growth consultant to HBCU Heroes and Thriving Forward Project, Justin sold two nonprofit founders on a SaaS go-to-market thesis they didn't initially trust: productize your mission for the platform's enterprise subscribers, release operational control, and let P&V run the channel end-to-end (onboarding, productizing, and personally facilitating 90%+ of every session).
Visit.org adopted HBCU Heroes as a reference customer in their own enterprise sales motion. Justin co-presented in their prospect pitches to subscribing corporations acting as a supply-side operator stepping into the SaaS sales cycle as the proof point.
Virtual-to-IRL upsell: Strong virtual delivery converted into on-site corporate HQ deployments. Justin and the founder of HBCU Heroes were flown to client headquarters to run in-person versions of the experience, with materially larger corporate donations attached and direct employee giving triggered post-experience.
P&V has connected hundreds of corporate volunteers with thousands of HBCU students for two-way learning experiences that evolve American workplaces and open corporate doors for students nationwide. Partners includedP&G, Amazon, Capital One, NASCAR, Citi, SiriusXM + Pandora, Goldman Sachs, Intel, Morgan Stanley, Spotify, LOL Network, RingCentral, Wieden + Kennedy, Tik Tok for Good, Linkedin, WayUp, Facebook, Michael B. Jordan Legacy Classic, Yahoo, Comcast, Lumen, Pure Storage, Alliance Bernstein, Twilio, Paul Hastings, GXO, Moody’s, Cowen, Coca-Cola, Lacework, Crowdstrike and many more.
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Selling SaaS into Fortune 500 Buyers Before the Category Existed
(2020)
A Per-Seat Virtual Engagement Platform Sold During COVID
Context: When theatrical distribution collapsed in March 2020, no buying framework existed for enterprise virtual engagement software for employee engagement and reflection. In support of Participant-produced John Lewis: Good Trouble, Justin closed Fortune 500 procurement teams on a hosted SaaS platform (Seed&Spark) delivering synchronous corporate experiences to thousands of employees, domestically and globally, when no comparable line item or vendor category existed.
The Sale: Consumption-based deals: minimum seat commit + per-seat overage, sliding-scale volume discounts indexed to VOD pricing. Full sales cycle through Salesforce. Closing required educating procurement, IT-adjacent stakeholders, DEI, Government Affairs, and ERG sponsors on platform reliability, global delivery, data integrity, security posture, and pricing rationale.
Mid-campaign, Justin brought a brand’s pushback on attendance forecasting risk back to ops and helped restructure the commercial model, the same field-to-pricing dynamic that defines modern usage-based SaaS sales.
Land-and-Expand Proof Point- Target: A single deployment expanded into a company-wide rollout where the CEO delivered the kickoff video. Three-hour deployment during paid work time. Live panel moderated by Target's VP of Government Affairs and VP of HR, and included a discussion with filmmakers. 4,000+ seats activated, 1,000+ on the live panel. Wrap report integrated into Target's broader pre-election employee program.
Partners includedAirbnb, Meta, Salesforce, Amazon, Chanel, Mattel, PayPal, Patagonia, Lyft, Nike, Target, Seventh Generation, Best Buy, Fisk University
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From Film to Fintech: The Fourth Act was a Platform Sale
(2019-2020)
The Context: ROMA won Best Foreign Language Film at the 2019 Oscars but the relationship between Participant and the National Domestic Workers Alliance would extend the conversations the film raised for years.
The Customer: NDWA Labs built the rails. Alia, a fintech platform letting employers contribute directly to a domestic worker's paid time off, disability, and other benefits, was the world's first portable benefits product for domestic workers. Founder Palak Shah was the customer. No CPG had ever underwritten a portable-benefits platform, and most consumers, including the people who employ domestic workers, didn't know the gap existed.
Across six months of consultative product GTM work, Justin helped NDWA Labs sequence the corporate launch and translate platform mechanics into language a values-driven marketing team could underwrite with confidence.
The Close: Justin closed Seventh Generation (Unilever) as the funder of Alia's first corporate-funded brand campaign. The six-figure commitment mapped the platform's mechanics to Unilever's and Seventh Generation's values-driven consumer thesis, and gave the funder enough fluency in the product to defend the spend internally. Justin then co-led the creative brief, translating what was learned about the buyer, the worker, and the architecture into an emotional, texting-format video showing the messages domestic workers type but never send, with Alia as the resolution. Oversaw paid social targeting informed by months of testing and survey data. The campaign drove +10K new platform users in a single month and won Fast Company's 2020 World Changing Ideas Award.
The Sequel: When COVID hit, Justin extended the play internally, selling Participant on funding a follow-up video and social campaign that ran on the same proven architecture with updated pandemic messaging. At this same moment, Alia became the disbursement rail for NDWA's Coronavirus Care Fund, which raised over $30 million against an original $4MM goal and moved $400 emergency grants directly into the accounts of thousands of nannies, house cleaners, and home care workers. The product Justin had helped brand 3 months earlier was now critical infrastructure during a crisis, and the architecture Justin built let the team reactivate in weeks, not months.
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American Eagle Outfitters: 4 Buying Centers Reactivated
Reopening a Dormant Enterprise Account Against Market Consensus
(2025-2026)
The Context: American Eagle Outfitters hadn't been a Crisis Text Line partner in 5 years. The reopening pitch landed Q1 2025, the same quarter DEI commitments were being abandoned during changing leading in D.C. Market read on a Black-students-focused HBCU mental health program: un-sellable. Drawing on previous HBCU nonprofit consulting work, Justin created the program that reactivated the partnership by educating internal and external stakeholders on why supporting HBCUs still mattered. The disagreement with the market was the deal, and the deal became the lesson.
The Expansion: Four-phase land-and-expand. Each phase opened the next buying center and required educating a new stakeholder on a use case they had no framework for.
Foundation: reopened with a productized HBCU program complementing existing mental health services on-campus, with custom keywords and toolkits for Howard, Morehouse, FAMU, and NCCU.
Marketing: pre-educated AE on the full range of crisis services CTL supported, then matched a DV-aligned beneficiary need for the Sydney Sweeney apparel launch. 100% of proceeds went to CTL; new lines still active.
Policy and Government Affairs: created and sold CTL's first-ever Capitol Hill Advocacy Day, aligned with the Improving Mental Health Access for Students Act, with AE product integrated into welcome bags for dozens of youth ambassadors from around the U.S.
International: first cross-border deal between AE Mexico and CTL's newly-acquired sister org, Aqui Estoy. Creator convening for Aerie's influencer roster and the first corporate donation received post-acquisition. Built a framework for all future cross-border partnerships.
Why all of this matters: Justin knows how to read the buying centers correctly, land the narrow use case, expand before the market has language for it.
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AWARDS:
• Fast Company’s 2020 World Changing Ideas, (Media & Entertainment)
Championing Benefits for Domestic Workers
Justin was the partnership and strategy lead on a digital initiative between the National Domestic Workers Alliance, Seventh Generation, Participant and SoulPancake, as part of an ongoing Social Impact campaign for the 2018 Participant film, Roma.
• 2019 Shorty Social Good Awards, GOLD, (Best Video Series)
• 2019 Telly Award, GOLD, (Best Non-Scripted/Documentary Branded Content Campaign)
Inclusive Storytelling that Shifts Perceptions
Justin strategized and led the partnership between Bonobos, Observatory and SoulPancake, with a goal to create a world where everyone feels they belong. The collaboration resulted in an impactful video series that featured inspiring graduates, including a young man who earned his college degree while incarcerated and a student who persevered through the US immigration process to build a life for himself in the United States.