Thirty years

Career

Mike Millett's career: founder of Digilu since 1999, VP of Marketing through the StratusClean repositioning, and marketing instructor at Pepperdine University.

Mike Millett

Thirty years across brand, reputation, search and growth work. Product brands and franchises, law firms, local service businesses, personal brands, ministries and nonprofits. Entries below carry only what can be sourced; where a date or a figure is not established it is left out rather than estimated.

Desktop publishing1988 The web Search Social AI visibility
  1. 1988Desktop publishing
  2. The web
  3. Search
  4. Social
  5. AI visibility

  1. Digilu 1999 to present

    Founder

    Founded in 1999 and now operating as an Adaptive Brand Management company: continuous responsibility for a client's trust, visibility and relevance rather than a project with an end date. Digilu builds and runs the measurement behind that work through The Observatory, its internal intelligence layer.

    The Digilu relationship · digilu.com

  2. Stratus Building Solutions, then StratusClean to April 2026

    VP of Marketing

    Led marketing for a national commercial cleaning franchise: the digital ecosystem and marketing infrastructure, brand positioning, and the four-year rebrand that ended with Stratus Building Solutions becoming StratusClean, which went live in April 2026.

    He designed the StratusClean identity himself in Adobe Illustrator, including the icon, the lettering and the taglines. A professional designer refined the execution afterwards.

    For four years he was also the internal point person for the company's entire HubSpot ecosystem, not only the marketing side of it, and the only day-to-day technical support for it in the business. A development company handled custom work; the internal ownership was his.

    The average Google rating rose from 3.4 to 4.7. Revenue roughly doubled. Over the same period Stratus Building Solutions took the number one place on Entrepreneur's Fastest-Growing Franchises list four years running, 2023 through 2026, which Entrepreneur records as a first in the history of that list. Those were won under the old name: the rename went live in April 2026.

    At his second annual meeting, in March 2023, in front of a room of franchise owners, he said AI was coming and that the foundation of Google SEO and Google Ads was going to die. He got in trouble for frightening them. He lost credibility, and not for being wrong: he had no plan to offer alongside the warning. He found one afterwards, and it was the unglamorous one, which was branding, Google reviews and trust.

    The full StratusClean story

  3. Pepperdine University around 2021

    Marketing instructor

    Taught marketing at Pepperdine: SEO and AI optimisation, e-commerce optimisation, and how infrastructure kills a site's speed and costs a business its results.

    That last one is not a generic web-performance topic. It is the technical half of the argument his AI-visibility work now makes commercially, taught in a classroom before it was ever a product.

    He also holds a Master of Divinity from Pepperdine and a Bachelor of Arts in Speech Communications.

  4. Protestant ministry

    Pastor, now retired

    Years of weekly public speaking to a live audience, which is where the speaking came from long before the marketing did.

  5. Desktop publishing from 1988

    In 1988, in high school, he produced an entire newspaper on a Macintosh. By 1989 he owned a business built on a Mac SE and a laser printer. This is the first of the five platform shifts he has worked through: desktop publishing, the web, search, social, and AI visibility.

Other current roles

  • MarketingOB1: creator and author of the publishing and teaching platform.
  • Entrepreneur Magazine and Authority Magazine: contributor.
  • Boston Scientific: Patient Ambassador.