Building an AI-enabled growth system for a Maine retreat venue
Dragonwood needed more than a pretty website. The work became a connected operating system: website, ads, campaign creative, content approval, lead tracking, reporting, SEO migration, and weekly optimization loops assisted by AI.
A beautiful property with too many disconnected handoffs
Dragonwood had the ingredients: 18 private lakefront acres, weddings, retreats, vacation stays, events, strong photos, and a story guests already loved. The hard part was making every part of the business talk to every other part.
Ads needed landing pages. Landing pages needed forms. Forms needed CRM follow-up. Social and email needed approval. Reports needed to pull from ads, search, email, outreach, and website activity. And creative had to move fast enough to keep up with campaigns.
Website, SEO & Conversion
- Migrated the site from Wix to a faster Vercel-hosted site with redirects, sitemap, page structure, and schema foundations
- Built dedicated paths for weddings, corporate retreats, families, lodging, events, and farm-to-table experiences
- Created landing-page logic around the buyer's intent instead of sending every audience to the same general page
AI-Assisted Ads & Creative
- Used AI-assisted workflows to generate, compare, and revise Google and Meta ad angles faster than a manual-only creative cycle
- Reviewed search terms and negative keyword opportunities continuously so ad spend could be tightened while campaigns were live
- Swapped copy and creative rapidly across wedding, elopement, family, corporate, and event campaigns
Dashboards, Approval & Reporting
- Built a client-facing command center for leads, content approvals, events, collateral, and weekly performance reporting
- Connected Airtable-backed approvals so social posts, newsletters, ads, and blogs could be reviewed before going live
- Turned weekly metrics into a repeatable operating rhythm instead of a one-off report scramble
Enablement & Operating Rhythm
- Translated messy business needs into simple workflows the client could understand, review, and act on
- Built feedback loops around ads, email outreach, search data, forms, and creative so decisions improved week by week
- Used AI as an execution accelerator while keeping human judgment in the consulting, offer, and brand decisions
Campaign assets that could change as fast as the market did
The practical unlock was speed. AI made it possible to generate and revise ad copy, compare hooks, rewrite segment-specific landing copy, and move from idea to usable creative direction in minutes. That meant campaign optimization could happen while the campaign was still running, not weeks later.
Dragonwood also needed tangible collateral for events and seasonal promotions. The work included posters, social content, newsletters, landing pages, and campaign assets built from the property's real visual library.
A working field case for AI enablement
These are lead and engagement metrics, not guaranteed bookings. That distinction matters because good enablement work should make the measurement cleaner, not inflate the story.
The Dragonwood work is the clearest example of how I use AI in practice: not as a novelty, but as an operating layer for consulting, creative testing, workflow design, reporting, and better decisions.Why it matters The same pattern applies to enterprise AI enablement: diagnose the workflow, design the solution, train the users, measure adoption, and keep improving.
The transferable part is the service model
This is the work I am excited to bring back into a larger institution: meet stakeholders where they are, translate their needs into a usable digital workflow, build the solution, document it, train the team, and then use the data to improve it.
Dragonwood is hospitality, but the enablement pattern is the same one higher education needs for AI adoption: practical use cases, clear governance-aware workflows, human-centered training, platform fluency, and a bias toward measurable improvement.