AI systems, automations, workflows — whatever it takes to get your team hours back and your operations running the way they should.
Mark Bailey, Jr.
Founder, MBJR Creative
The Take
Look, I'll tell you what I tell everyone who asks: AI is real, it's already changing how businesses operate, and most of the conversation around it is still nonsense. Every week there's a new tool that promises to replace your entire team, and every week most of those tools don't actually do what a real business needs them to do. The gap between what AI can do and what most companies are actually doing with it is massive.
I spend my days inside that gap. I'm not writing think pieces about the future of work or debating whether AGI is five years away. I'm in the weeds with business owners who have real teams, real processes, and real problems that are costing them time and money right now. The AI that matters for them isn't the flashy stuff — it's the systems that quietly save their team 10 or 15 hours a week and make the whole operation feel like it's finally running the way it should.
That's the work I care about. Not the hype, not the predictions — just figuring out where AI actually moves the needle for a specific business, and then building it.
The Work
I'm not an advisor who hands you a strategy deck and wishes you luck. I build the actual systems. When I work with a business, I'm mapping their operations, sitting in their workflows, figuring out where the bottlenecks are — and then I'm building the AI-powered tools that fix them. Automations that route approvals, agents that draft content in your brand voice, dashboards that pull insights from data your team was already collecting but never had time to look at.
Most of what I build runs on tools my clients already own. Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, HubSpot, Slack — these platforms all have AI capabilities baked in now, and almost nobody is using them. Before I recommend buying anything new, I want to know what's already in the stack and what we can make it do. Nine times out of ten, there's more there than anyone realized.
I built this entire website with AI. Every page, every animation, every line of code — written and iterated with Claude as my engineering partner. It's not a gimmick. It's how I work every single day.
When AI first started getting serious traction, I wasn't just curious — I was obsessed. I started running everything through AI: internal content, sales materials, meeting notes, go-to-market strategies. I got sharp at the back-and-forth of prompting, at knowing when to push a model harder and when to scrap the output and start over. That's a skill most people underestimate — knowing what AI is good at and what it's terrible at, and adjusting your approach in real time.
Now I do that full-time. I wake up, open my tools, and build things with AI all day. By the time I'm working with a client, I've already tested most of the approaches that could work for them — because I've been testing them on my own business first.
The Backstory
I started in radio at 95.1 WAPE in Jacksonville, moved to LA to work on Glee at Paramount, then came home to St. Augustine and joined my dad and grandpa's insurance firm, The Bailey Group. I taught myself marketing from scratch and built us from zero inbound leads to nearly a thousand over five years. When we were acquired by NFP, an Aon company, I ended up leading sales marketing campaigns across the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. — property & casualty, life sciences, cyber, benefits, dozens of verticals. Along the way I sat in every room: sales, ops, HR, finance, benefits. That cross-functional experience is the thing I carry into every AI engagement now, because understanding how departments actually connect is how you build systems that people use.
Behind the board at 95.1 WAPE
First trip to Hollywood
Glee production office, Paramount
Three generations at The Bailey Group
HubSpot INBOUND, 2013
NFP Strategy Summit, 2015
NFP Atlantic sales leadership
The Rest
Home is Elkton, Florida — farmland and back roads just outside St. Augustine — with my wife Amy and our two boys, Hudson and Abel. When I'm not building AI systems I'm probably playing Arc Raiders after the kids go to bed, riding my Harley (a 2024 Nightster), or dragging the family to Universal. We're annual passholders, Epic Universe is everything I hoped it would be, and Monsters Unchained is the greatest ride ever built. I will not be taking questions on that.