ABOUT CHRISTINA RAE
I learned to build before I learned to call myself a strategist.
My career has crossed industries, roles, businesses, and bodies of work. The titles changed. What I was learning to do underneath them did not: see the whole system, understand the people inside it, find the problem beneath the problem, and build something that works in the real world.
The Journey
A career built in layers.
I didn’t leave one career behind to begin another. Each chapter added skills, perspective, relationships, and ways of thinking that I carried into the next. What looks multidisciplinary now was built over decades—one layer at a time.
01 — HANDS
Construction + Operations
I was barely into my twenties when I entered construction, working alongside my father at Carotex Construction.
We worked on multimillion-dollar federal building projects across the South. The jobs were serious. The stakes were high. And most days, I was the only woman on-site.
No one handed me authority because I was young, female, or someone’s daughter. I had to earn it the old-fashioned way: by knowing the job, solving the problem in front of me, keeping my word, and showing up again the next day ready to carry what needed carrying.
I stayed in construction for more than a decade.
Long enough for it to stop being “my father’s world” and become part of mine. Long enough to understand that leadership is not about being the loudest person in the room. It is about being the person who can see the whole job, make the call, communicate the next move, and remain standing when everyone else is looking for someone to blame.
Construction taught me how to lead people who were not predisposed to follow me. It taught me how to manage pressure without performing panic. It taught me that details matter, deadlines matter, and your word matters most when things are difficult.
It also taught me something I carry into everything I do now:
I am wired to build.
Not just buildings. Brands. Businesses. Visibility. Meaning. Momentum. A clearer path forward for the person standing in front of me with a vision, a mess, a message, or a life that no longer fits.
Construction was never a chapter I needed to outgrow or explain away. It was the first place I learned to trust my ability to take something that exists only as an idea—and make it tangible.
That is still the work.
I have always been a builder. The materials changed, but the instinct did not.
02 — BRAND
Entrepreneurship + Momentive Media
I wanted to build something of my own.
In 2011, I set out to build a marketing agency.
Not because I had a perfectly mapped five-year plan or a polished investor deck, but because I could see a gap that was costing small businesses more than money.
I kept watching sales and marketing teams behave like opposing sides instead of two essential parts of the same conversation. One team generated attention. The other was expected to close it. Everyone protected their territory, and somewhere in the middle, the customer—and often the business itself—carried the consequences.
At the same time, I was seeing something that bothered me even more.
Small business owners—people who had built real companies with their own labor, savings, sweat, and risk—were being treated as transactions by the very agencies they hired for help.
Websites were held hostage. Brand files disappeared behind paid invoices. Contracts created dependence instead of momentum. Business owners bought complicated packages they didn’t understand and were left without access, ownership, clarity, or a real path forward.
I knew there had to be a better way to do this work.
So I built Momentive Media around a simple standard: do excellent work, tell the truth, keep the client’s best interest in view, and never build a relationship around making someone dependent on you.
Then it grew.
I was intentional about building an agency.
What I was less prepared for was how quickly it would grow.
From the outside, it looked like I had a solid foundation. The work was coming in. Clients referred other clients. Projects kept moving. The business had momentum.
But growth and stability are not the same thing.
I had built something valuable, but I hadn’t built all of the internal structure required to hold the pace of its growth.
That lesson shaped me as much as the success did.
I learned that a business can look strong while still asking its founder to carry far too much of the weight. Sustainable growth requires systems, support, boundaries, and a foundation strong enough to hold what you say you want.
Still, I kept showing up.
Relationships became the infrastructure.
For sixteen years, Momentive Media grew almost entirely through relationships and referrals.
I was never the stereotypical salesperson. I didn’t build the business by becoming the loudest voice in the room, chasing every lead, or pressuring people into contracts.
I built it by overdelivering.
By listening closely enough to understand what a client was actually trying to solve—not simply what they thought they needed to buy.
By protecting relationships. Making meaningful connections. And treating the success of people who trusted me as something personal.
And I built it through a network.
Construction had already taught me the value of relationships, reputation, and knowing who to call when a job required more than one person could carry.
I brought that with me into entrepreneurship.
Over the years, I’ve built relationships with people who are exceptionally good at what they do—strategists, designers, developers, writers, media buyers, SEO specialists, photographers, videographers, automation experts, and more.
I don’t believe one person should pretend to be everything to every client.
If I’m the right person for the job, I’ll tell you.
If I’m not, I’ll tell you that too.
And chances are, I know someone who is.
That’s how I believe meaningful work gets done: not through gatekeeping, ego, or pretending to have every answer, but through trusted relationships, deep expertise, and a shared commitment to helping the client win.
The business kept changing. So did I.
Momentive Media has changed many times since 2011 because marketing itself has changed many times.
I built an agency before “digital marketing” carried the meaning it carries now—before social media became a serious business strategy, before content became currency, and long before artificial intelligence entered our everyday conversations.
I’ve repeatedly had to become a new version of myself inside the same business.
Learn the platforms.
Understand the technology.
Question what changed.
Figure out what actually mattered.
Adapt without throwing away everything I already knew.
For a long time, I thought that constant evolution meant I hadn’t found my lane.
Now I understand that evolution is the lane.
I’m not interested in the newest tool simply because it’s fashionable. I’m interested in understanding what will actually help a business become clearer, stronger, more visible, more connected, and more sustainable.
And somewhere along the way, I realized the instinct underneath my work hadn’t changed nearly as much as the work itself had.
It was the same instinct I’d carried out of construction:
I see the vision.
I look for the missing structure.
I bring in the right people.
And together, we build something that can hold.
03 — VOICE
Strategy + Story
The writer was there before any of the rest of it.
Long before Momentive Media needed a brand voice, I already had one.
I was in first grade when my English teacher submitted one of my poems for publication, and it actually got in—some collection I can no longer name.
As far as I remember, my parents never bought the book.
I don’t know that I fully understood, at six or seven years old, what it meant that a stranger thought my words were worth printing.
But I understood something about who didn’t come looking for them.
And I kept writing anyway.
Through my teens and into my twenties, I studied the art of writing and healing. I wrote poetry. I submitted my work. I had poems published. Writing wasn’t something I stumbled into later because marketing required it. It was already part of the way I moved through the world.
Later—somewhere around my late twenties or early thirties—I began exploring automatic writing and stream-of-consciousness writing.
That changed my relationship with the page.
Writing became less about creating something good and more about allowing something true to come through.
I wrote to release.
I wrote to heal.
I wrote the things I couldn’t always say.
Sometimes I shared them.
Mostly, I didn’t.
The page became a place where I could be unedited. Where I didn’t have to make what I was feeling understandable, acceptable, polished, or useful to anyone else.
And then life taught me that even the page wasn’t always safe.
My own words became weapons in someone else’s hands.
Three different times in my life, with three different people, what I had written from those most private places was violated and used against me.
When you’ve written something as a way of releasing what you can barely hold inside yourself—and someone takes those words and uses them to shame you, control you, beat you down, or force you into submission—you learn very quickly that being seen can have consequences.
So I stopped letting myself be seen.
I went quiet for almost a decade.
Not professionally.
That’s the strange part.
I could still write for everyone else.
When Momentive Media needed copy, I wrote it. When a client couldn’t find their voice, I helped them find it. Messaging. Ghostwriting. Campaigns. Websites. Email. Social content.
For more than a decade, language was part of my work.
I could give other people words while withholding my own.
And perhaps because I’d spent so many years doing both—the private writing and the professional writing—I became increasingly aware of what language actually does.
The smartest strategy in the world can fall apart the second nobody recognizes themselves inside the language describing it.
I’ve watched sharp positioning disappear inside copy that sounded like every other company in its category. I’ve watched an average idea outperform a better one because someone finally said it the way the audience actually talks to themselves.
Strategy can tell us what needs to be said.
Language determines whether anyone hears it.
And then my own voice started coming back.
Slowly at first.
I didn’t think I was as good a writer anymore.
Something that had once moved through me without permission felt less certain. I questioned it. Edited it. Held pieces back.
But several years before WEL-Systems entered my life, something in me had already begun waking up.
And the more I began questioning my life, my relationships, the identities I’d constructed, the things I’d survived, and the stories I’d accepted about myself, the more the writing returned.
Then came WEL-Systems.
Decloaking.
The intensives.
The experiences between them.
The breakdowns that became breakthroughs.
And the floodgates opened.
This time, though, something was different.
I published it.
Not after I’d figured everything out.
Not after I’d turned it into a neat lesson.
Not once I could tell the story from the safety of the other side.
I began publishing from inside the experience.
The realizations. The contradictions. The poetry. The anger. The grief. The questions. The things I was shedding and the woman emerging underneath them.
Writing became an evolving record of me witnessing myself change in real time.
And somewhere in there, I stopped believing everything I published needed to arrive perfectly dressed.
Now I publish differently.
Raw.
Unkempt sometimes.
Imperfect.
Still becoming.
But real.
There is editing, and there is erasing yourself in the pursuit of being acceptable. I’ve learned the difference.
I don’t need every thought to become content. Some writing still belongs only to me.
But I no longer believe my voice has to be polished into something safer before it deserves to be heard.
That’s a profound shift for the little girl whose first published poem was chosen by somebody else.
Because now?
I choose what gets published.
I choose what stays private.
I choose when the page opens and when it closes.
I choose how much of myself belongs to the reader.
And nobody gets to take that authorship away from me again.
Writing is still how I release.
It’s still how I investigate.
It’s still where I follow patterns, question my first explanation, and sometimes discover that the story I’ve been telling isn’t the story at all.
But now it is also something else.
A body of work.
Not because everything is finished.
Because I finally stopped requiring myself to be finished before I let myself be seen.
The writer was there before any of the rest of it.
I think maybe I’m finally letting her take up the space she was asking for all along.
04 — SYSTEMS
AI + Intelligent Systems
Then I found a technology that could keep up with the way my brain already worked.
I should probably say this up front: anything I write here about a specific AI tool will likely be outdated within weeks of publishing it.
That’s the speed of this industry—and strangely, part of why I was drawn to it.
I’ve spent most of my career working inside things that refuse to stay still. Marketing changed. Search changed. Social media changed. The businesses I built changed. I changed.
Every time the landscape moved, I learned the next thing—not because I love chasing shiny objects, but because I’ve always wanted to understand what changed, what matters now, and what we can build with it.
AI felt different.
It wasn’t simply another platform I needed to learn.
It felt like several parts of my brain suddenly had somewhere to meet.
Language. Strategy. Research. Systems. Pattern recognition. Creativity. Technology. Business.
So, naturally, I went down the rabbit hole.
I became less interested in asking AI to produce something for me and more interested in understanding what I could build with it.
What happens when a system knows the source material? When it understands someone’s actual voice instead of producing generic copy? When we connect research, knowledge, strategy, content and automation instead of starting from scratch every time?
One rabbit hole became another: brand voice systems, custom GPTs and agents, automation, AI-assisted research, SEO/AEO/GEO, knowledge architecture.
And eventually, AI stopped being another service I could offer through Momentive Media.
It changed how I operate.
I’m a serial entrepreneur. There is rarely one thing happening in my world—businesses, clients, writing, ideas, research, projects, systems I’m building, things I’m learning, problems I’m trying to solve.
For years, I carried an enormous amount of that architecture in my head.
AI gave me somewhere to externalize some of it.
Not outsource my thinking.
Extend it.
I use it to capture ideas, interrogate decisions, organize research, find patterns across my own work, pressure-test strategy, document what I’ve learned, and turn things I’ve done repeatedly into systems someone else can actually use.
It has become part of the infrastructure of how I work and build.
But the deeper I’ve gone into AI, the more certain I’ve become about something else:
The human cannot disappear from the system.
I’m an advocate for this technology. I’m also unwilling to surrender judgment to it.
The questions underneath my work remain remarkably familiar:
What are we actually trying to create?
What does the system need to know?
What can we trust?
What should be automated?
What needs a human?
What should never be delegated?
And maybe that’s why AI made so much sense to me.
The writer is here.
The builder is here.
The entrepreneur is here.
The strategist is here.
The researcher who will disappear down a rabbit hole until she understands something is definitely here.
AI didn’t create another version of me.
It gave a lot of the versions already here a place to work together.
The tools in my hands are different now.
The builder isn’t.
.
05 — SELF
Coaching + The Human System
Eventually, I had to turn all that pattern recognition on myself.
For years, I could walk into someone else’s business and see what wasn’t working.
The disconnect in the strategy. The missing structure. The thing nobody was saying. The pattern underneath what looked like a completely different problem.
I was considerably less interested in applying that same scrutiny to my own life.
For a long time, I would have told you the story of Momentive Media as a straight line: I saw a gap, built a company, made it work, and kept evolving it.
That story wasn’t untrue.
It just wasn’t the whole truth.
Because I had also built from scarcity.
I could create success, hit a ceiling, rebuild, create success again—and eventually find myself staring at another version of the same ceiling.
Different circumstances.
Different people.
Different explanations.
Same pattern.
And pattern recognition gets considerably less comfortable when you realize you’re the common denominator.
Eventually, I couldn’t keep calling everything bad timing, the wrong market, the wrong person, or another isolated experience.
I had to ask a different question:
What if some of what kept happening to me was also being created through me?
That question changed the direction of my work—and my life.
I went looking for ways to understand what strategy couldn’t reach.
Coaching. NLP. Somatics. Trauma-informed practice. Shadow work. Embodied writing. Art. Energetics. WEL-Systems.
Not because I had decided to collect another set of credentials or become a different kind of professional.
I needed language and tools for the system underneath every other system I’d spent my life trying to understand: the human being creating it.
And that meant me first.
The deeper I went, the harder it became to separate the way we build businesses from the way we build identities.
The way we lead from the way we’ve learned to survive.
The decisions we call strategy from the beliefs underneath them.
The structures we create around ourselves from the structures we’re carrying inside ourselves.
It changed the way I understand leadership, communication, creativity, relationships, business, identity, change—and my own history.
It also changed the way I understand every Christina who came before this one.
The builder wasn’t separate from the strategist.
The strategist wasn’t separate from the writer.
The entrepreneur wasn’t separate from the woman doing the healing.
They were all building from the same human system.
And once I could see that, I couldn’t unsee it.
This work hasn’t replaced sixteen years of business ownership, construction, marketing, strategy, writing, technology, or everything else I’ve accumulated along the way.
It changed the depth from which I bring all of it into the room.
I still build.
I still strategize.
I still follow the pattern.
I just don’t run from a ceiling anymore without asking first whether I built it.
WHAT I BRING INTO THE ROOM
Experience is useful when it changes how you see.
SYSTEMS THINKING
I look for what connects.
I rarely see a marketing problem as only a marketing problem, a workflow problem as only technology, or a leadership problem as only people.
LANGUAGE + STRATEGY
I make the complicated usable.
I move between big-picture strategy and the words, systems, decisions, and next actions that make it real.
PATTERN RECOGNITION
I pay attention to what isn't being said.
Client work, writing, entrepreneurship, coaching, and lived experience taught me to listen beneath the stated problem.
TESTIMONIALS
What People Are Saying
PROFESSIONAL EVIDENCE
Credentials, chronology, and receipts.
EXPERIENCE
Career Timeline
Roles, companies, founder experience, industries, and professional chronology.
TRAINING
Credentials + Education
Relevant marketing, AI, coaching, somatic, creative, and professional training.
PROOF
References + Testimonials
What employers, clients, and collaborators say about the work.
WORK WITH ME
Collaborate with Christina Rae
Strategic Consulting
Engage in high-level strategy sessions to align your business goals with actionable plans. Christina’s expertise in AI and marketing ensures that your strategies are both innovative and grounded in reality.
Creative Coaching
Unlock your creative potential with personalized coaching sessions. Christina guides you through transformative processes that enhance your creative expression and professional growth.
AI Integration
Leverage cutting-edge AI technologies to streamline your operations and enhance decision-making processes. Christina helps you integrate AI solutions that are tailored to your unique business needs.