Steven Michael Fies

Steven Michael Fies, founder of S.MICHAEL Creative Branding

Steven Fies is a builder. For over a decade he’s helped companies design their brands, produce and ship their merchandise, run their marketing, and modernize their technology – often several at once, and always with his hands on the work. Clients hire him because he doesn’t advise from the sidelines: he builds, ships, and executes right alongside them.

Some notable wins: He runs the branded merchandise program for Arrive Logistics, with over $1M in orders to date for a 2,000-person, $2B-a-year company. He helped grow Kitay Law Offices from $1M to $7M in annual revenue over five years as their outsourced marketing leader, and manages their $1M+ annual marketing budget across SEO, PPC, branding, media, and technology. The Echelon was featured on The Real Housewives of Dallas after their rebrand; Tammy Lally landed on the front page of TED.com (2M+ views); and DermResearch was acquired after overhauling their digital marketing and operations.

How he got here

Steve’s path wasn’t traditional – he built it by doing every layer of the work himself for more than two decades. He started coding at ten, launched his first tech consulting business at thirteen, and was managing web servers across four school campuses by seventh grade. He graduated from UC San Diego in 2008 with honors, earning a B.S. in Management Science (Economics & Business) – setting the curve in his marketing class and working as an Economics TA. He spent his early career in the branded merchandise industry as a project manager, directing eCommerce operations and building multi-million-dollar web store programs for clients like Makita Power Tools.

In 2015 he founded S.MICHAEL Creative Branding as a one-man web design shop. Branded merchandise followed within a year or two, then digital marketing, then full marketing strategy and executive oversight – each capability added because a growing client needed it. Single projects became retainers; retainers became long-term partnerships. The business crossed $1M in revenue in 2022, and today branding, merchandise, marketing, and consulting all sit at the heart of the work.

Most recently, AI has become a defining part of how Steve operates. He builds with Claude Code every day – developing custom applications, automating his own operations end to end, and engineering secure AI systems for clients (including a purpose-built platform for Kitay Law Offices). It’s the natural next step for someone who’s spent a career solving every kind of problem a growing company faces, and it lets him deliver at a speed and scale that used to take a full team.

He also founded ThinkPlanLaunch, a human capital consulting practice focused on hiring, onboarding, and team development using behavioral assessment tools.

Notable

  • #4 bestselling author in Business & Money on Amazon.com (2016) – surpassed Donald Trump during his first presidential campaign
  • Selected by NASA as 1 of 50 social media influencers to cover an ATLAS V rocket launch (2017)
  • Instructor at General Assembly (branding, marketing, technology workshops)
  • Co-founded Bassics recording studio in San Diego (2012)
  • Licensed ASI distributor with access to 1M+ promotional products
  • Supported 100+ clients; 99.7% order success rate

Personal

Steve is a husband and father based in Raleigh, NC. Outside of work, he plays guitar and chess, builds things in his woodshop, and takes his jet ski out on the lake.

Social

Want to connect? Find Steve on LinkedIn