About TradeBuilt
I'm Amanda Dwyer. I've spent more than 20 years in marketing and commercial leadership — not just running campaigns, but owning the strategy behind how businesses grow: pricing, channel structure, service architecture, go-to-market, partnerships.
At Audi, I worked closest to the channel — the dealerships, the people on the floor actually selling to actual customers. At Sonos — a publicly traded company — I led programs for the custom installer trade, working directly with the small business owners wiring speakers into living rooms across the country. At Glorious, a private equity-backed company, I took on broader commercial leadership: the kind of role where you're accountable to the P&L, not just the marketing budget.
That mix — brand strategy, commercial operations, and genuine proximity to small business owners in the trades — is what makes TradeBuilt different from any other marketing consultant you could hire.
After two decades of that — plus all the politics, the corporate theater, and the growing distance from anything that actually mattered — I decided I was done.
I live in the Santa Ynez Valley. I love it here — the valley, the people, the pace of life, and the community of people building things and running businesses and making this place what it is.
When I decided to leave corporate, the question wasn't what — it was obvious. I'd take what I know: real marketing strategy, 20 years of brand-building, a track record of growing businesses, and a genuine interest in the businesses closest to the ground — and put it to work for the people in my own backyard.
Specifically, the people who build things with their hands. Contractors, tradespeople, builders, and the suppliers who support them. The people who literally built this valley and keep it running.
I'm not a contractor. I'm not going to pretend I know how to run your crew or bid a job. What I know is how to build a business — and specifically, how to help businesses like yours grow.
That includes marketing: brand, website, local SEO, social, paid media, email, PR, community presence. The full toolkit.
But it also includes the business itself: pricing your services so you're actually profitable, designing a service menu that's easy to sell and makes sense at scale, building the referral partnerships that send work in both ways, and thinking through what growth actually looks like for your specific business in your specific market.
I've done versions of all of this inside publicly traded companies and private equity-backed businesses. I know how to apply that rigor to a $750K trade business or a $2M general contractor as much as to a company with thousands of employees.
What I don't bring is agency overhead. It's me. I learn your business, own the strategy, do the work, and use AI as a production tool to deliver at a quality and pace that would have cost five times as much a few years ago.
There are trade associations that help with licensing and codes. There are national agencies that manage marketing on behalf of big manufacturers. Neither of those is this. TradeBuilt is direct, local, and built around your business — not a category or a contract.
This isn't charity work and I'm not pretending it is. I need to make a living — and I intend to. But the reason I'm doing it this way, in this place, for these people, is because I believe it matters.
When contractors and tradespeople on the Central Coast grow, the whole community grows with them. Neighbors get good work done by people they trust. Local money stays local. The valley stays the valley.
That's the work I want to do. That's what "work that matters" means.
Quick credentials
Common questions
Yes. TradeBuilt is me — Amanda Dwyer. I bring in trusted specialists for specific production work when needed (web development, photography, video), but strategy, client relationships, and everything that actually matters is handled by me directly. There's no team of juniors managing your account.
Automotive retail and channel marketing at Audi; the custom installation trade at Sonos, where I led commercial programs for small business installers across the country; and commercial and marketing leadership at Glorious, a private equity-backed company. The thread through all of it is proximity to the business owner and the end customer — not the corporate center.
Both. Marketing is a core part of what TradeBuilt does — brand, digital, social, paid, PR, all of it. But I've also spent a career doing the commercial work behind the marketing: pricing strategy, service architecture, channel partnerships, go-to-market planning. For contractors who want more than a better website — who want to think through their pricing, their service offerings, their referral network, or their growth path — that's available too. Sometimes the best marketing decision is a business decision.
Because the gap between the quality of their work and the quality of their business infrastructure is often enormous — and entirely fixable. The best tradespeople I've encountered over the years, the Sonos installers and dealer service managers, were doing exceptional work with almost no real business or marketing support behind them. The whole premise of TradeBuilt is that they deserve better than that.
Yes, and I'm upfront about it. AI is a production tool — it helps me move faster and work more efficiently. What it doesn't replace is strategy, judgment, and knowing your business. I use AI the way a good contractor uses a nail gun: it's a tool that makes the work better and faster. The expertise behind it is still what you're hiring.
Work that matters.