Certified Delight

Carly Riemann is a professional brand wrangler, part-time cake anarchist, and full-time someone-who-actually-enjoys-agency-level chaos. She co-created and co-hosts Hire Drills — the world’s first game show that makes job searching weirdly fun and oddly useful — and personally built the brand, assets, and the social engine that keeps the nonsense trending. She also books guests, produces and edits content, and cajoles generative AI into doing her bidding.

Carly is a freelance Creative Director, copywriter, and strategic brand consultant who’s helped brands like HENRŸIA, TimberTech, Bon Vivant Cakes, and ComedySportz Chicago grow smarter (and occasionally funnier). She’s written monthly columns, fueled content for platforms with 50 million visitors, and even convinced an e-commerce page to squeeze 12% more from customers. At TimberTech she wrangled 87K followers with social strategy; at PEAK6 she managed a $1.3M budget, launched employer branding that actually worked, and designed a billionaire’s style guide that multiplied speaking gigs like BOGO sales. Along the way she’s rebranded colleges, refreshed fintech identities, and saved teams hundreds of hours, all while leading squads of nine-plus creatives into high-functioning units that ship on time and sometimes laugh about it. Her specialty: making complex businesses clear and compelling through email nurtures, thought leadership, brand frameworks, and content calendars that teams can use without swearing — strategies she’s deployed across fintech, higher ed, real estate, insurance, and beyond to generate leads, grow audiences, and fuel multi-million-dollar revenue (with a suspicious amount of fun).

Off the clock she is equal parts improv performer and pop-culture scholar: she performs improv around Chicago, reads voraciously, paints, and concocts multimedia cake art that is both delicious and slightly terrifying. She lives with two cats and a dog who have strong opinions about her set lists and whether reality TV counts as “research” (it does). When not painting or piping frosting, she is usually watching the sort of reality TV that fuels her next midnight sketch.

Amateur Human

Nick Lloyd is a proudly overqualified ringmaster for other people’s attention. By day (and often by night), he’s a brand strategist, copywriter, and accidental AI whisperer who has a particular talent for turning stodgy fintech messaging into something that won’t make humans stare blankly at a slide deck. He co-created and co-hosts Hire Drills, the world’s first game show about job hunting — a gleefully silly project he writes, hosts, produces, and edits using an army of generative-AI helpers and whatever coffee is left in the pot.

Professionally, Nick does the things senior marketing people claim in case studies: at Apex Fintech Solutions he led a rapid in-house brand evolution in 10 weeks, saving roughly $200K and six months of agency hand-wringing while stewarding brand and content for a $164B AUC fintech. Earlier roles include Senior Brand Manager work that tripled leads year-over-year (and delivered a 7x spike in event-driven leads), grew organic web traffic dramatically, and built a sales-content system that helped close 30+ clients and lift AUC by tens of billions. He’s also written campaigns and RFP overhauls for the likes of Chase, Google, PwC and Charles Schwab — which sounds fancy because it is.

Outside spreadsheets and stakeholder calls, Nick is domestically famous: he lives with his wife and three cats, whose opinion of his chalk murals and short plays is complicated but loud. In his free time he writes short plays, makes chalk art that the neighbors pretend not to notice, and produces Hire Drills — the perfect intersection of useful career advice and absurd internet entertainment.

Absolute Menace

Meatball is a 2.5-year-old Mini Goldendoodle–Bolognese mix, equal parts fluffball and mastermind. Officially, he lives with his landlord Carly, but if you ask him, Carly is his best friend and occasional hostage. His hobbies include hoarding plushie balls, liberating socks directly off people’s feet (why wait for the laundry basket?), and collapsing into laps like a weighted blanket with opinions.

When he’s not supervising household affairs, Meatball dedicates his time to his true mission: serving as Nick’s fiercest rival for Carly’s attention. Spoiler — he’s winning. With charisma, curls, and the confidence of someone who’s never paid rent, Meatball remains undefeated in the domestic power struggle.