Navy Intelligence to Digital Marketing: Chris Seminatore’s Transition Journey

Paul Pantani
4 days ago
18 min read

How Military Precision Shapes Modern Advertising and Geofencing Strategy

In episode 221 of the Transition Drill Podcast, Chris Seminatore shares how growing up in small-town Ohio shaped his entrepreneurial spirit, how service in the U.S. Navy taught him discipline and precision, and how those same lessons now drive his success in geofencing, marketing, and advertising. His path hasn’t been straight, and that’s exactly what makes it powerful. Veterans, first responders, and business professionals alike will find themselves drawn to his story of risk, failure, and adaptability. Whether navigating the chaos of post-military transition or building businesses from scratch, Chris proves that the same mindset that keeps you mission-ready in uniform can lead to innovation in the boardroom. His life isn’t just about surviving change; it’s about mastering it.

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A Sailor’s Education: From Small Town to Intelligence Work

Chris Seminatore grew up in Goshen, Ohio, a small town where everyone knew everyone and a handshake still meant something. The kind of place where life moved at a pace that let you notice the seasons change. His dad ran a small TV repair shop, teaching Chris early on that everything you see around you is someone’s business. Every service, every product, every opportunity started with a person who decided to make something happen. His mom worked as a nurse in the psychiatric ward at Christ Hospital and volunteered for the local life squad. When the radio in the kitchen went off, she’d grab her bag and go, no questions asked. Watching her rush out the door to help people made an impression. Service wasn’t something she talked about, it was something she lived.

That mix of hard work and service stuck with him. As a kid, he’d set up a little table outside the local IGA to sell comic books and lemonade, later mowing lawns and hustling whatever he could to make a few extra dollars. He didn’t know it yet, but that was the beginning of an entrepreneurial instinct that would follow him his whole life.

By high school, Chris was a solid athlete, playing defensive end on the football team and wrestling, though he joked he was “the guy you wanted to wrestle.” Sports gave him a sense of competition, but school itself didn’t hold his attention. He graduated in 1986 without a clear direction. College seemed like the next step, but not for any particular reason. He drifted through a couple of schools, trying philosophy because it sounded deep and because, as he once put it, he’d just watched Road House and thought being a bouncer studying philosophy seemed like a good fit.

He bounced from odd jobs to roofing, learning quickly what he didn’t want to do. One summer job ended with chemical burns from roofing pitch, leaving him in a dark basement for days while his skin healed. It was a lesson in discomfort and endurance, one that stuck with him long after the burns faded.

By his early twenties, the need for direction was eating at him. He wanted to see the world, to get out of Ohio and find something bigger. The Navy offered exactly that. It wasn’t some childhood dream of being a sailor; it was curiosity mixed with a little restlessness. The recruiter promised travel, challenge, and structure, and that was enough. So in 1989, he signed up.

Boot camp was in Orlando, Florida and it was a shock to the system. This was the Navy before sensitivity training and self-care. It was loud, rough, and full of salt-soaked chiefs who took pride in breaking you down to see what was left. Chris found humor in it even then, watching the artistry in how some of those chiefs could tear into a recruit. He learned to take it, laugh when he could, and move forward. That was the job.

Somewhere in that chaos, one of those chiefs noticed something in him. Chief Hendricks pulled him aside one day and asked if he’d ever thought about working in intelligence. It wasn’t something Chris had considered, but the offer caught his attention. Intelligence sounded mysterious, technical, and, most importantly, different. The Navy ran a background check for the clearance, and soon agents were knocking on doors in Goshen, asking his second-grade teacher and childhood friends about him. In a town that size, that kind of attention didn’t go unnoticed.

He trained at Fort Devens, Massachusetts, where the Navy sent him for intelligence school. It was an intense environment, heavy on discipline and precision. Learning to collect and interpret information, to find patterns in chaos, started shaping how he thought about everything. When Desert Shield began heating up, he was assigned to the USS Long Beach, later rotating to the USS Abraham Lincoln.

The Gulf was a different world. The heat was punishing, and the tension never really left the air. There were moments when the ship’s sensors would light up with missile locks, alarms screaming through the decks, and everyone wondering if this was the one that hit. Those memories etched something deep inside him. He learned how to operate when everything around him was uncertain, how to stay calm when calm didn’t seem possible.

Onboard, his work was methodical. He spent his days identifying frequencies, tracking signals, and mapping where enemy forces might be based on those transmissions. It was tedious at times, but there was something about the puzzle of it that fascinated him. Intelligence wasn’t about guessing; it was about connecting fragments until the truth revealed itself.

Even in those years, he could feel the military changing. The old guard, the Vietnam-era sailors, were still around. rough, unfiltered, and proud of it. but a new tone was creeping in. Leadership was starting to feel more corporate, less personal. To Chris, the Navy was supposed to be about readiness for war, not policy or public image. But he also understood that change was inevitable. It was a conversation that stayed with him long after he hung up the uniform: where do you draw the line between tradition and progress?

Six months at sea turned into a rhythm. The ports, Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, the Philippines. were brief windows of life outside the gray walls of the ship. He loved the adventure, the energy of being somewhere new. The Philippines, especially Manila, left an impression. The city was alive, unpredictable, and full of stories. It was there he began to understand people in a different way—their patterns, their emotions, the small tells in behavior that hinted at bigger truths.

That awareness would later become the foundation of everything he built afterward. At the time, though, it was just life in motion. He was young, curious, and learning lessons that would follow him into every venture that came after: stay alert, adapt fast, trust your instincts, and never underestimate the power of human behavior.

When his enlistment was ending, the Navy offered him a hefty six-figure reenlistment bonus, a fortune at the time. But after years of tension and heat, he didn’t want to go back to another desert deployment. He wanted to take what he’d learned and apply it somewhere new. Within two weeks, he’d gone from military order to college chaos, sitting in classrooms at Miami University of Ohio wondering what came next. The Navy had given him a global education in human nature, but civilian life would test how much of it he really understood.

From Uniform to Uncertainty: The Turbulent Years of Discovery

Leaving the Navy was like walking out of a storm into silence. One day Chris was operating in a world where every move had purpose and structure, and the next he was back in Ohio surrounded by open time and too many choices. Within two weeks of separating, he went from a ship’s deck to a college classroom at Miami University of Ohio. The change hit him harder than he expected.

He’d always been someone who thrived under pressure, someone who needed clear direction. The military had given him that, but college life didn’t. Sitting through lectures about theory after living through war zones felt hollow. He couldn’t relate to the small talk, the casual pace, or the lack of urgency around him. Everyone else seemed to be figuring out their place, and he was trying to figure out why he didn’t feel like he belonged.

At first, Chris thought the problem was academic. He threw himself into his studies, majoring in psychology and knocking out the pre-med coursework because becoming a doctor seemed like a noble path. He spent long nights buried in organic chemistry textbooks, pushing through by sheer will. But the real struggle wasn’t with the material, it was with himself. The discipline and adrenaline of Navy life were gone, replaced by a quiet that felt too loud.

He couldn’t explain it then, but he was restless and angry without a reason. He didn’t know how to transition from the version of himself that survived deployments to the version that was supposed to sit in a classroom and talk about future plans. There were moments when he self-destructed, not out of recklessness but out of confusion. The military had trained him to act, not to sit still and think about what came next.

Writing became a way to cope. He’d always been drawn to stories, to the rhythm of words. Now it became therapy. He filled notebooks with thoughts, sketches of ideas, and fragments of scenes that never quite fit together. He read everything he could get his hands on—Hemingway, Kerouac, Hunter S. Thompson—writers who lived hard and wrote honestly. They didn’t sugarcoat the human experience, and that spoke to him.

Somewhere in that process, he realized he wasn’t built to live an ordinary life. He finished his degree, but the idea of staying in the Midwest, following a predictable path, felt like slow death. California was calling. Los Angeles had always held a strange pull on him. As a kid, he’d stare at pictures of Sunset Strip in the encyclopedias, imagining a world of neon lights, freedom, and endless possibility. So when he had a little cash saved, he packed what he could into an old ’85 Thunderbird and pointed it west.

He didn’t have a plan. No job waiting, no friends out there, just a feeling that he needed to go. Ten thousand dollars and a restless heart were enough. The drive itself was a kind of cleansing. Mile after mile, he left behind who he was supposed to be and leaned into who he might become.

When he hit Los Angeles, the city was everything he hoped it would be—loud, fast, chaotic, and alive. He found a cheap apartment in Hollywood, the kind of place where the walls were thin and the neighbors were loud. He’d walk down Hollywood Boulevard, grab coffee, and flip through the Hollywood Reporter classifieds, circling anything that looked remotely interesting. That’s how he landed his first job at J. Michael Bloom Talent Agency.

It wasn’t glamorous. He spent his days stapling headshots to resumes and mailing them out to casting calls. Still, he was surrounded by energy and ambition. The walls were lined with photos of actors chasing their own dreams, and in a way, that kept him going.

He jumped from job to job, chasing experiences more than paychecks. One gig had him holding a camera for a Woody Harrelson–funded project pushing for marijuana legalization, back when that was still considered a radical cause. He’d never worked a camera before, but he figured it out as he went. It wasn’t about the job itself, it was about the doors it opened—the people, the stories, the chaos.

Around that same time, he met an author named Peter McWilliams, a free thinker and controversial writer who lived the kind of life most people only read about. Their conversations pulled Chris deeper into writing. He started working on a novel, pouring himself into it for months. The book, The Last in Line, told a story set in the aftermath of Desert Storm—a fictional CIA operation that mirrored some of the things he’d seen and felt while deployed. It wasn’t a war story so much as a story about what war does to people.

Writing that novel became an obsession. He’d sit for hours at a typewriter, hammering away in a small apartment, surrounded by pages of notes and coffee cups. He’d go through phases of inspiration and despair, rewriting chapters, then tossing them in the trash. It was raw, lonely work, but it connected him to something deep inside himself. He’d later say that writing was like peeling an onion; each layer revealed something he wasn’t ready to see.

When the book was done, he sent it to every publisher he could find. Rejection letters started piling up, each one polite but final. Still, he didn’t quit. He wasn’t writing for fame, he was writing to make sense of his own head. That process—of putting thoughts into words, of confronting his own story—became a kind of training in itself. It sharpened how he saw people, how he read situations, how he understood motivation.

Outside of writing, Los Angeles became his classroom. He spent nights at the Rainbow Bar & Grill and the Whiskey a Go Go, surrounded by musicians, hustlers, and dreamers. The late 90s were still buzzing with the last echoes of the rock-and-roll era, and Chris fit right into the chaos. He’d ride his Harley down Sunset Boulevard, chasing the city lights and the kind of freedom he couldn’t find anywhere else.

He was learning that risk and creativity came from the same place. Whether it was writing, business, or just survival, you had to be willing to step into uncertainty and trust your instincts.

That mindset—shaped by discipline from the Navy and tempered by the unpredictability of Los Angeles—was quietly building toward something bigger. He didn’t know it yet, but everything he was doing, from reading human behavior to navigating unpredictable situations, was preparing him for the next chapter: entrepreneurship.

He’d soon find out that business, much like intelligence work, was about reading people, managing risk, and acting decisively when the information’s never perfect. The next few years would test every skill he had, and more than once, nearly break him.

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Trial by Fire: Entrepreneurship, Success, and Setbacks

By the time Chris found his footing in Los Angeles, he’d already lived enough lives for two people. He’d been a sailor, a student, a writer, and a drifter. But none of it quite scratched that itch to build something of his own. He’d grown up watching his dad run a small business and knew the thrill of figuring things out without a safety net. That same hunger started pushing him again, only now it came with the edge of experience.

His first real step into that world started in an unlikely place: finance. At the time, he was working for UNICEF in Santa Monica, helping raise funds for children’s programs. It felt good to do something meaningful, but it didn’t pay enough to survive in Los Angeles. The city had a way of reminding you that passion didn’t always pay the bills.

One day, he saw an ad for financial advisors at Morgan Stanley in Beverly Hills. He had zero experience, no connections, and no family money, but that didn’t stop him. He figured he could learn fast enough. Within weeks, he was on a plane to New York for two months of training, learning the language of Wall Street and how to sell investments to people with more money than he’d ever seen.

Back in Beverly Hills, he’d show up to the office at 4:30 in the morning, coffee in hand, reading the Wall Street Journal like it was a manual for survival. He started out cold-calling, hundreds of calls a day, pitching mutual funds and retirement plans to people who mostly hung up on him. It was demoralizing work, but he treated it like boot camp. If he couldn’t outtalk them, he’d outwork them.

Then he found his angle. One afternoon, while visiting a large local company, he noticed a contact directory sitting on the receptionist’s desk. When she stepped away, he slipped the list into his folder and walked out. That book became his breakthrough. Instead of calling random numbers, he started calling employees directly, setting appointments under the guise of reviewing their 401(k)s. He didn’t ask if they wanted to meet—he gave them options: “Wednesday at two or Wednesday at three thirty, which works better for you?”

The plan worked. People were hungry for guidance and didn’t realize how poorly managed their retirement accounts were. Chris started transferring their plans under Morgan Stanley’s management, and as the late 90s market boomed, so did his clients’ portfolios. He made a name for himself fast, building real relationships, not just sales.

Then came the crash. When the dot-com bubble burst, it hit everyone hard. The phones stopped ringing, accounts dropped overnight, and clients who’d once called him a genius now called to yell. Offices were getting bomb threats, tires were being slashed, and the optimism that had fueled the market vanished. Watching people’s life savings disappear was brutal. Chris knew he couldn’t live in that constant panic. He’d made good money, but he’d also seen how fragile it all was. So he walked away.

Not long after, he and a friend came up with a new idea. A way for parents to check in on their kids at daycare through web-based cameras. This was before video streaming was reliable, but they saw potential. Parents could log in from work, watch their kids play, and know they were safe. They called it a way to connect families, but really, it was one of the first glimpses of how personal surveillance would become part of everyday life.

They hustled daycare centers, pitching the service as a competitive advantage. “Parents will pick your facility over anyone else,” they’d say, and they were right. Centers signed up, parents subscribed, and for a while, it worked beautifully. The problem was technology moved faster than they could keep up. The cameras aged quickly, bandwidth limits made streaming choppy, and updating the hardware was expensive. Within a couple of years, the company was buried under costs they couldn’t cover.

That failure stung, but Chris didn’t stop moving. He’d learned that good ideas weren’t enough; you had to understand the tech, the timing, and the money behind it. So he pivoted again. In the late 90s, the entertainment industry was booming, and Los Angeles was ground zero for new media. Chris started producing small projects, mostly experimental, until one idea caught fire. Poker was exploding on television, and he and a partner decided to ride that wave—with a twist. They’d create a poker show featuring beautiful women players and bring on a recognizable name to host it. Carmen Electra signed on, and just like that, Strip Poker Night was born.

It wasn’t exactly a safe bet, but it worked. The first video made almost two million dollars in revenue and was distributed nationally through retailers like Barnes & Noble. They were already planning a sequel when the project started to unravel.

The director, someone they’d trusted, tried to steal the master tape, the only existing copy of the final cut, and fly to Israel with it. Chris and a few friends intercepted him before he made it to the airport, retrieved the tape, and shut the whole thing down. That experience changed him. It was proof that success drew not just opportunity but predators.

By the early 2000s, Chris had become used to the highs and lows of business. He’d seen things soar and crash in equal measure. His next venture, a company called Metree, started like all the others—with an idea, a small budget, and blind faith. He and a friend set up an office in Newport Beach with folding tables and phones, running classified ads for a “work-from-home medical billing opportunity.” The ads worked, and within days the phones wouldn’t stop ringing. They were selling legitimate software, helping people start their own medical billing businesses, and the demand was enormous.

They scaled fast; too fast. They brought in new hires, built scripts, and tried to manage the flood of calls. Then one morning federal agents showed up. Accounts were frozen, the office raided. It wasn’t fraud, at least not in the traditional sense. The problem was paperwork and perception. Some of their partners weren’t clean, and the government lumped them all together.

It was December 19, 1999, just before Christmas. Chris had no money, no assets, and no way home. He sat in his apartment bouncing a blue rubber ball against the wall, wondering how everything had fallen apart again.

That night changed him. He realized that success meant nothing if you didn’t control your environment. The people you partnered with could destroy you just as quickly as they could make you rich. From then on, he promised himself to vet everyone, to know who he was dealing with before he ever signed a paper or shook a hand.

Still, the fire to build something never went out. He was too far in to walk away. After Metree collapsed, he got involved in television again, working on productions and chasing new projects. Los Angeles was still buzzing with possibility, and he wanted back in.

He started another company centered around media and marketing, using lessons from every hit and miss that came before. He understood attention now; how to get it, keep it, and turn it into momentum. Marketing, he realized, wasn’t that different from intelligence work. It was about reading people, recognizing patterns, and using the right information at the right time.

Each failure had given him something valuable: resilience, adaptability, and an instinct for when the tide was about to turn. He’d been through markets collapsing, businesses imploding, and partnerships burning down. But he’d survived all of it. Now, with years of hard-earned experience, he was finally ready for a business that combined everything he’d learned; a field that connected psychology, data, and influence into one powerful tool. That next step would take him back to his analytical roots, only this time, the battlefield wasn’t overseas. It was digital.

The Pivot: Geofencing, Marketing, and the Modern Mission

By the time Chris stepped into the world of marketing and advertising, he’d already lived through enough business wins and losses to fill a book. The late nights, the blown opportunities, the small victories that turned into big crashes; they all taught him one simple truth: if you want to survive in business, you’ve got to stay curious. You’ve got to keep learning, even when you’re bruised.

After years of chaos, marketing felt like familiar territory. It was a space that blended creativity with psychology, instinct with analysis. It required reading human behavior the same way he once read radar signatures and intercepted communications. Where others saw ads, Chris saw intelligence work. Every impression, every click, every engagement was data waiting to be interpreted. And just like in the Navy, success came down to understanding patterns before anyone else did.

He got into marketing at the perfect time, right when digital platforms were exploding and location-based technology was becoming the next big thing. Businesses were trying to figure out how to connect with people in real time, not just through a screen, but through where they actually were. Chris saw the potential immediately. That’s where geofencing came in.

At its core, geofencing is a way to create a virtual boundary around a specific location—a store, a stadium, a city block—and send messages, ads, or offers directly to people’s phones when they enter or leave that area. To most people, it sounded like tech jargon. To Chris, it was tactical communication. It was targeting with precision, the way intelligence units used coordinates to track movements. Only now, instead of monitoring enemies, he was helping businesses find their customers.

He started working with small companies, first local restaurants, gyms, and car dealerships, helping them understand how powerful it could be to connect directly with the right audience at the right time. If someone walked into a competitor’s store, the client’s ad could appear on their phone before they even checked out. It wasn’t just advertising; it was digital positioning.

What set Chris apart was how he explained it. He didn’t talk like a marketer. He talked like someone who understood people. He could break down the psychology behind buying decisions, the emotional triggers that make someone stop scrolling or take action. That mix of technical know-how and human insight made his work stand out.

As his reputation grew, so did his clients. He began helping larger companies craft entire campaigns built around geo-fencing technology, integrating it with social media, video ads, and analytics. But even as the numbers got bigger, the mission stayed the same: communicate better. He believed good marketing wasn’t about tricking people; it was about understanding them.

For veterans and first responders stepping into the business world, that perspective mattered. Chris often pointed out how much of marketing paralleled the skills they already had. Mission planning, situational awareness, and adaptability are all translated directly into the business world. In a sense, he was still serving, only now his battlefield was digital and his weapon was information.

The technology itself fascinated him. It wasn’t just about reaching customers; it was about mapping behavior, understanding why people move the way they do, what catches their attention, and what drives loyalty. The same mindset that once kept him alive on deployments now kept his clients alive in competitive markets.

He’d seen too many people in business fall into the trap of thinking creativity alone could carry them. To Chris, creativity without strategy was chaos. He built campaigns the way a commander builds an operation: define the objective, assess the environment, identify the target, and execute with precision. And if the plan failed, adapt fast.

Through all of it, he never lost sight of the human element. His mom’s service as a nurse, his father’s lessons in entrepreneurship, and the leadership of his Navy chiefs were all still part of the equation. He approached marketing with the same heart his mom brought to medicine and the same grit his dad brought to business.

Today, Chris runs his own marketing and advertising firm, using geo-fencing as the cornerstone of a strategy that blends old-school grit with new-school tech. He’s proof that the skills forged in uniform can thrive in a boardroom, that resilience learned in combat zones can outlast market crashes, and that curiosity, the drive to learn, to adapt, to explore, is the most valuable tool anyone can have.

When he talks about marketing now, it’s not from the perspective of a salesman but as someone who’s spent a lifetime figuring out how people think and what drives them. He knows that connection, not conversion, is what makes brands matter. He understands that in a world flooded with noise, authenticity wins.

For veterans, first responders, or anyone trying to find their next mission, Chris’s story carries a simple message: your experiences are your advantage. The discipline, the decision-making under pressure, the ability to read people, those skills don’t vanish when you hang up the uniform. They evolve.

From a small-town kid in Ohio to a Navy intelligence specialist, to a writer, entrepreneur, and now marketing strategist, Chris’s life hasn’t followed a straight line. It’s been a series of pivots, each one built on the last. Geofencing might be the technology he uses today, but what really drives him is connection—between people, between stories, between ideas. And for someone who’s spent his life chasing purpose, that connection is the mission he was always meant to find.

Closing Thoughts

Chris Seminatore’s story isn’t about luck, it’s about grit, growth, and the ability to pivot when life changes course. From the precision of Navy intelligence to the creativity of marketing and geo-fencing, he’s shown that the core skills of service, discipline, adaptability, and awareness can build success anywhere. For veterans, first responders, or anyone searching for their next chapter, his path is a reminder that transition isn’t an ending, it’s an evolution. Every challenge holds a lesson, every setback a new direction. The mission may change, but the drive to lead, learn, and make an impact never does.

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