About Us

Sidemark was not built in a tech boardroom. It was built inside working design firms, by people who are still running them.

Meet The Founders

BUILT-IN EXPERT GUIDANCE

When you hit a roadblock, you’re not opening a support ticket with someone who has never managed a client project.

You’re getting access to experienced professionals who understand Sidemark's systems because they helped build them.

Michelle Lynne spent nearly two decades in corporate America managing multi-million-dollar operations before building ML Interiors Group from the ground up. She knows how a real business runs and knows exactly what it feels like to be a designer buried under the work of running one. That's what she brought to Sidemark.

The processes inside Sidemark's client engagements were built and tested inside her firm first. Not theory. A working design business that proved the system before anyone else ran it.

She also coaches interior designers on the business of interior design, which means she has spent years sitting across from the exact problems Sidemark was built to solve. That experience doesn't live outside the offer: it's built into it.

Ben Rutledge built and ran Fraktion Agency for 14 years, managing more than $173 million in ad spend for local service businesses, including interior designers. He sold the agency before co-founding Sidemark.

That history is what makes his role here different. Ben does not have to guess what works for design firms. He has the data, the failed tests, and the winning campaigns to prove it. When Sidemark builds a paid ads strategy or lead nurture sequence for a client, it is built on existing results.

At Sidemark, he leads marketing strategy and execution. His job is making sure the right clients find you, and that when they do, there is a system ready to move them forward.

Katie Decker-Erickson founded Color Works in 2007 and grew it into a multimillion-dollar, process-driven design firm operating in 20+ states. She did not do that by being a talented designer alone. She did it by running the business like a business.

That background, an MBA, nearly two decades of operational experience, and years of coaching designers on pricing, profitability, and scaling through Success by Design, is what she brought to Sidemark.

At Sidemark, her expertise lives inside the offer itself. The operational frameworks, the financial structure, the scaling logic. That is her territory, and it is built into what every client receives.

Danny Marsh is a co-founder of Sidemark where he leads product and technology. Over more than a decade, Danny has built software companies and taken digital products from first sketch to market launch, work that has spanned enterprise healthcare at Epic Systems through founding and scaling his own startups.

His throughline is a knack for turning tangled, do-it-all workflows into clean, scalable systems, which is exactly the problem Sidemark set out to solve for interior designers: giving firms the technology infrastructure to run like a real business without having to become a tech expert to do it.

An engineer by training with a designer's eye and an operator's instincts, Danny is happiest making powerful technology feel simple, so designers can spend less time wrestling their business and more time doing the work they love.

THE DIFFERENTIATOR:

Most software is built by developers who have never run a design firm.
Most coaches don't build software.
Most marketing agencies don't understand what happens after the inquiry comes in.

Sidemark was built by people who are still operating inside the industry today.

Two active interior design firm owners. Two experienced business coaches. A marketing agency founder who has managed $173 million in ad spend.

A technology founder who has built and scaled multiple software companies.

Every workflow, system, and process inside Sidemark was informed by real firms, real projects, and real results. Not theory.