Hi, I'm Ryan Miner. This is My Story.

I grew up in a town where people showed up.

Hagerstown, Maryland taught me everything I know about trust, dignity, and what happens when you pay attention.

Skip my story. Here's how I can help you →

Where I Come From

Halfway, Maryland. Washington County. The kind of place where your grandfather worked at the same job for thirty-five years and nobody thought that was remarkable because that's just what people did. They showed up. They stayed. They kept their word.

My Grandfathers

My grandfather Dick Hann was one of those people. He spent the Second World War defusing land mines across Europe. Work where patience wasn't a virtue but the difference between living and dying. He came home, married Maureen, and spent the next three and a half decades keeping the lights on at Hagerstown's Municipal Electric Light Plant. Quiet, essential work. The kind that doesn't make the paper.

My other grandfather, Scotty Miner, was career Air Force. Chief Master Sergeant at the 167th Airlift Wing, overseeing aircraft maintenance where the margin for error was measured in lives. He ran systems that had to work every time, because if they didn't, people didn't come home.

Both of my grandfathers were military veterans. Their service shaped how I think about obligation and what this country owes the men and women who served it. We have to take care of our veterans. Every one of them. That's not a political position. It's a debt.

These men didn't talk about values. They demonstrated them. Every morning, for decades.

My Grandmothers

My grandmother Maureen graduated from Hagerstown High School in 1950, where she was known for cutting a rug at the Dancing Club. She went on to help build Gardenhour Roofing into a real business. She watched the stock market like other people watch sports. She fed every stray cat on Glenside Avenue and grumbled about the kittens that kept showing up at her door, but she never stopped feeding them.

She could beat me in any argument. I wouldn't admit it at the time, but she always won.

My grandmother Joyce was born into a family of twelve children on a dairy farm in Washington County. She became one of the most beloved cafeteria workers in the county's history, the kind of woman whose warmth could fill any room she entered. She used to tell the story of watching the moon landing on a television in her living room. I think about that a lot, because the generation that put a man on the moon deserves better than what we've given them in return. She is alive. She is in memory care. And every decision I make in my professional life asks the same question: is this good enough for Joyce?

My Mother

My mother, Colleen, spent fifteen years as a caregiver advocate for my grandparents. Fifteen years. Not a job. Not a title. An act of daily, relentless, fierce love that shaped everything I understand about what it means to serve another person.

She advocated for my grandparents when the systems meant to help them didn't. She fought insurance companies, she navigated healthcare bureaucracies, she made phone calls that nobody wanted to make, and she did it without asking for credit. When something wasn't right, she said so. When a facility wasn't treating someone with dignity, she showed up. When the world told her to accept the way things are, she didn't.

My mother taught me two things I carry into every professional relationship I have. The first: what's right is right. Not what's convenient. Not what's politic. Not what avoids conflict. What's right. The second: you walk alongside people rather than leading them. You don't stand in front and pull. You stand beside them and walk together. That distinction changes everything about how you treat the people you serve.

I didn't learn those things in business school. I learned them watching my mother fight like hell for people she loved, every single day, for fifteen years.

My Father and Stepfather

My father, Bryan, gave me roots. The foundation upon which everything else could be built. He taught me that kindness, laughter, and showing up on time aren't small things. They're the things that hold everything together when the complicated stuff falls apart.

My stepfather, Leon, showed me that family is built through choice and commitment, not just blood. He chose to be part of our family. He chose to invest. And in that choice, he proved something I believe to this day: the people who show up because they want to, not because they have to, are the ones who change your life.

My Wife, My Love, My Life

Kimberly saved my life. I don't say that as a figure of speech. I mean it in every possible way a person can mean it.

She has watched me fail. She has watched me cry. She has watched me struggle with things I couldn't name and things I was too proud to admit. She has sat with me through the worst of it and never once made me feel like I was too much or not enough. She simply helped me become the man I am today. Not by fixing me. By believing I was worth standing next to while I figured out how to fix myself.

I'm an imperfect person married to someone who is nearly perfect in every way. I don't know what I did to deserve her. I just know that everything I've built, everything I'm building, and everything I will ever build has her fingerprints on it, because none of it would exist without her.

Music, Politics, and Changing Direction

I graduated from Williamsport High School in 2003. I was a musician. That's what I thought I was going to do with my life.

My first year at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh was spent in their world-class music school as an undergraduate music education major. I wanted to be a conductor. A Maestro. My hero was John Williams, because he could take an orchestra and make a room full of strangers feel the same thing at the same time. I wanted to write music, to score it, to bring alive those emotional connections the way Williams did in every film he ever touched.

Then I dipped my feet into the weird world of politics, and everything was different. I switched to political science and graduated from Duquesne in 2008. I earned my MBA from Mount St. Mary's University in Emmitsburg in 2020, with a promise to myself: build a business within five years of graduation.

But I never stopped being the kid who wanted to conduct. I just changed instruments. Whether I'm writing, or branding, or sitting across from a business owner telling them the truth about their marketing, it's the same impulse. Find the emotional truth in the room and make it land.

I went to Duquesne searching for the nearest Sheetz to campus, because I needed something that reminded me of home. That probably tells you everything you need to know about the seventeen-year-old I was.

My Career

Capitol Hill

I started on Capitol Hill. In 2008, I was working as a Staff Assistant in Washington, D.C., during the Obama-McCain presidential election. I was twenty-three, watching history happen from inside the building where it was being made. Things were calmer then. People could disagree without trying to destroy each other. That experience was exceptional, and it taught me what civic engagement is supposed to feel like.

A Miner Detail

In January 2015, I started a podcast about Maryland politics because I thought every other political podcast in the state was extremely boring. In April 2015, I launched A Miner Detail as a written investigative journalism platform covering state and local politics. Eleven years later, I'm still writing about Maryland politics and news. People still complain that I'm too moderate, too pragmatic, too willing to change positions when the evidence changes. That's fine. I'd rather be right than consistent.

As a journalist, I learned to see underneath what people say to what they actually mean. I learned that the most important stories are the ones nobody wants written. If you're going to put your name on something, it better be true. People will remember what you got wrong longer than what you got right.

Board of Education

In 2014, I ran for the Washington County Board of Education. Education is the most precious thing we can partake in, and I wanted to impact the system in my hometown. I ran a grassroots campaign, door to door, handshake to handshake, the only way I know how to do anything. Washington County voters had a different idea at the time, and I lost that race.

It was one of the best learning experiences I ever had.

During the campaign, people close to me urged me to drop out. People were saying mean things. It could hurt me. It could follow me. They wanted me to quit when the going got tough. I couldn't think of anything more cowardly. And it taught me something I've never forgotten: sometimes the people closest to you don't understand you. They care about you, but caring and understanding are not the same thing. Not everybody is going to take the time to understand your mission, your driving purpose. That's a lonely thing to figure out. But once you do, it frees you.

The In-Between

I need to be honest about something, because the career section above makes things look more linear than they were. It wasn't one job to the next. It was: how do I survive?

In between the jobs that sound good on paper, I was a server at Texas Roadhouse. I waited tables at Olive Garden. I worked at Pizza Uno. I worked at a shoe store once because I just didn't know what I was doing with my life or where I wanted to go or what I wanted to do. For the longest time I was embarrassed by this. How could I go so wrong in my career that I'd have to stop and wait tables just to pay rent?

One summer I went out to New Mexico to work for a political campaign as the communications director. I came back home in the middle of the summer, in the middle of the campaign, and I needed a job. I ended up at Culligan Water, knocking on people's doors, trying to get them to buy water softener services. It was a great job for many people. I was not cut out for that kind of gig.

Small Business

I worked for a year and a half at my family's heating and air-conditioning business in Hagerstown. A great experience. A wonderful service-based business, long-standing in the community. It taught me more than I could possibly share about digital grassroots marketing, keeping people in tune with services, helping people understand contracts and how service relationships work, improving day by day. Small businesses are the backbone and heart of our communities. That's not a line. That's not a PR spin. That's nothing more than the honest-to-God truth. Small businesses are the true backbone of our communities because people dared to fail many times without much direction, but they built something lasting. And it's theirs. And they did it when other people were afraid to. I honor that.

Technology Startup

In 2012, I worked for a startup technology company that had no idea who they were as an organization because the owner was perhaps the most awful human being I've ever worked for in my life. Profit was it. They hired me as the person with the words to translate their technology so the public could understand it. But you can't translate something when it changes every day, or when the owner is sending you messages on Christmas Day with expectations that a press release about a non-essential issue be pushed the following day. There are jobs where you swallow your dignity because you need the money. This was one of them. It taught me a whole new knowledge base I never knew I needed, and it taught me who I never wanted to work for again. Nobody should ever have to sacrifice their dignity for fundamentally awful human beings. If that sounds harsh, it should. It's true.

I was diagnosed with ADD at five years old and medicated in first grade. But stretches without health insurance made the medication too expensive. So I went without. Clinical depression runs in my family. It's genetic. Thank God for Vyvanse. I'm also an INFJ, which means I feel things at depths that people sometimes find to be too much and absorb the emotions in a room the way other people absorb sound. It's exhausting. It's also the reason I'm good at what I do, because the gap between what someone says and what they actually mean is not a puzzle I solve with data alone.

The great thing about ADD, and I mean this, is that before the crash comes, before the feelings that the world is crumbling when you take on too many challenges and you're looking in twenty different directions, the great thing is: you get to trial a whole lot of new things. You get to figure out what you like and don't like. You accumulate experiences that people on linear paths never get. Every restaurant job, every door I knocked on, every failed campaign, every terrible boss gave me something I use today. My brain didn't give me the option of not trying.

Consulting

Eventually I found my way into private consulting. Small businesses. Public affairs. Digital strategy. Restaurants. Service-based businesses. Getting people up and moving on structural marketing plans, building systems that create workflows and consistent relationships. And now AI systems. That work isn't work to me. It's art. Not in the sense that people will appreciate it a hundred years from now, but art in the sense that it's something I get to engage in, over and over and over again, and I've fallen in love with the process.

I built The Senior Soup into a Maryland senior advocacy platform, because the people who needed a voice the most were the ones least likely to create one for themselves.

Home Care

I went to work for a couple of home care agencies, and that's where I fell in love with working with older adults. I did their marketing and operations, and this is where I learned how to translate the most difficult moments families face. How to be the human being sitting in front of them saying: it's going to be okay. We're going to get you through this. I'm going to be here every step of the way. This relationship is a lifetime, because once you become part of us, you are family.

I believe that's how every business has to treat their customers. When a consumer chooses you, they are making a conscious decision to choose you over thousands of other options. You better make them feel valued in every single interaction, and you better ensure they are happy for a lifetime, because they trusted you to take care of them. That trust becomes obligation. That's how I fundamentally see how businesses should work. If someone doesn't share that vision, I'm not the right person for them.

Ennoble Care

Then I spent years at Ennoble Care as a Community Relations Manager, doing grassroots healthcare marketing across Washington, Frederick, and Montgomery Counties. I built relationships with senior living communities one handshake at a time. Ennoble Care taught me what I needed to know about liaison-based marketing, and the data is clear: the way most organizations measure that work is fundamentally wrong. They count visits when they should be measuring trust.

BlueStar SeniorTech

I spent time at BlueStar SeniorTech in channel-based sales, working with dealers and resellers across the country who sold technology products into senior living communities. What I learned there is something most marketing consultants never experience firsthand: the organizations that grow aren't the ones spending the most on advertising. They're the ones whose people can explain what they do, clearly, to the right person, without checking a script. If the message can't travel outside the slide deck, it's dead. That lesson changed how I think about every piece of marketing I've built since.

Senior Living

In 2022, I worked at a senior living community for two months. I was fired for no reason. It reinforced what I already knew: some organizations shouldn't be in this business. There is no illusion in marketing. It's people telling an honest truth about their business, about why they started, who they are, and consistently demonstrating in every single interaction that you, the customer, are their most important mission. Getting it right every single time becomes the mission itself. If someone doesn't agree with that, they should never work with me, because I am uncompromising and relentless in pursuit of this.

That was my real education. Years inside systems that tell you one thing and do another, and a few rare places that actually meant what they said.

Volunteering

Brook Lane Foundation

In 2014 and 2015, I volunteered on the Brook Lane Foundation Board. Mental health care has always mattered to me, and Brook Lane is one of the institutions that holds Washington County together in ways most people don't see.

In June 2020, our son Josh lost his best friend to suicide. After that, my family got involved with a teenage suicide prevention organization, because when something like that happens, you don't just grieve. You act. The work I'd done years earlier with Brook Lane took on a different weight. Mental health isn't an abstract cause for me. It's personal.

Alzheimer's and Parkinson's

I'm a volunteer for the Alzheimer's Association and the Parkinson's Foundation, though not nearly as much as I should be. That's changing. Over the next several months and into the summer, I'm committing to doing far more. When your grandmother is in memory care, these aren't organizations you support from a distance. They're lifelines.

Hospice of Washington County

In March 2025, I became a hospice companion volunteer for Hospice of Washington County. The decision was shaped by two losses: my grandfather Dick's death in December 2020 and my mother-in-law Leslie Large's unexpected death in June 2024. Both changed me fundamentally. Grief does that. It doesn't make you wiser. It makes you different. And volunteering for hospice provides me more comfort than maybe I'm providing to others, because nothing is more sacred than being able to let somebody you've never met know that you care, that you're here, and that their life matters.

Sigma Alpha Epsilon

I'm a Sigma Alpha Epsilon alumnus, Pennsylvania Xi chapter at Duquesne University, and I'm involved in SAE's alumni program.

Education

Williamsport High School, 2003. Williamsport, Maryland.

B.A. in Political Science, Duquesne University, 2008. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

MBA, Mount St. Mary's University, 2020. Emmitsburg, Maryland.

What You'll Find If You Search My Name

If you've searched my name, you may have found things written about me that aren't flattering. Some of it is true. Some of it isn't. I'm going to address this directly because that's what this page is for.

When I left Hagerstown for Duquesne at seventeen, I thought I was ready. I wasn't. I was a kid whose entire life had been spent in Washington County, now alone in a brand new city with no familiar ground underneath me. I had attention deficit disorder that was no longer being treated with medication, because the consistency of care just wasn't there. And I had clinical depression that hadn't been diagnosed yet, which meant I was fighting something I couldn't name and didn't know existed.

That's not an excuse. But it's real. It's what happened. For a long time I refused to look at it clearly. Years of therapy helped me understand what I was actually going through at seventeen and eighteen and into my twenties, and why I made the decisions I made. Understanding isn't absolution. But it's the difference between repeating your mistakes and learning from them.

There's something else I carried out of that house in Washington County, and I've never written about it publicly until now. My mother's first husband mentally, emotionally, and physically abused her throughout much of my childhood. I saw it firsthand. Up close and personal. I was a kid, and I had no framework for processing what I was watching happen to the person I loved the most. So I did what people do. I kept it to myself. But what I saw during my childhood didn't stay in my childhood. It crept into my own relationships, into the way I understood love and conflict and trust, in ways I couldn't see until years of therapy forced me to look. My mother was strong enough to escape all of that. She rebuilt her life with a courage that still amazes me. But I'm still angry about what he did to her. And until it's made right, it's not.

I made poor decisions in relationships. I hurt people. Not because I intended to, but because I was lost and didn't have the tools to be the person I should have been. I'm not going to minimize that. The people I hurt deserved better.

I carried that forward into my twenties. I struggled. I failed. I repeated mistakes I should have learned from the first time.

Later, a career in Maryland political journalism made me a target in the way that anyone who writes critically about powerful people becomes a target. Some of what's been written about me online is political retaliation. Some of it is exaggeration. And some of it reflects real failures that were mine to own.

I'm not going to litigate which is which. I'm not going to ask anyone to feel sorry for me. I chose public life. I chose to put my name on things. That comes with consequences, and I accept them.

I'll also say this plainly: in politics, people have taken the things they dislike about me and weaponized them. That's what politics does. It finds the tender spots and presses. I'll freely admit that much of it hurts. It would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. And it only reinforces something I've had to learn the hard way: I have to be absolutely protective of my mental health. I am on a journey of self-reflection that didn't start when it became convenient and won't end when the attention fades.

When the attacks extended to my family, something changed in me. I built a shield. And that shield has sometimes made me too defensive, too reflexive, too quick to strike back when I felt the people I love were threatened. There have been times when I made decisions in haste because I was scared that someone would go too far. And some of them did go too far. But fear is not a strategy, and reacting from fear has cost me. I have to be a better human than my worst day. I hope others see that. I'm working on it in ways that aren't always visible from the outside.

I'll never forget sitting in Stu Mullendore's dining room in 2014. Stu was helping me with my Board of Education campaign, or so I thought. He had Googled me. And in front of my wife, he scolded me like I was a small child, bringing up things from my past that he didn't understand, didn't ask about, and didn't care to. He made me feel less than human. I sat there and took it, because I didn't know what else to do. I'll carry that moment until the day I die. Not because of what he said. Because of how it made me feel inside. Like I would never be allowed to be anything other than the worst version of myself. That is a life-altering thing to do to someone. And it changed me in ways I'm still understanding.

But I want to be absolutely clear about something. People will continue to bring up issues of my past. They may try to strike. That's their choice. I am fearless about this, because the man standing in front of you right now is who I actually am. Not a curated version. Not a cleaned-up story. This is who I am, what I am, how I have evolved. I'm not running from any of it. I'm standing in it.

What I will say is this: the person who made those mistakes at twenty-one is not the person writing this at forty. That isn't an excuse. It's a fact. I've spent the years since then building a marriage, raising two children, sitting with dying patients as a hospice volunteer, watching my mother care for two aging parents with ferocious love, and burying three grandparents whose example I failed to live up to in my youth.

Growth is not a talking point for me. It's the central project of my adult life.

I have done that work. I continue to do it every day.

If you're reading this and you've already decided who I am based on a Google search, I understand. The internet is permanent and the world is not always forgiving. But if you're the kind of person who believes that people can grow, that redemption is real, and that what someone builds in their forties matters as much as what they broke in their twenties, then I'd like the chance to show you who I am now.

That's all I'm asking for. Not a clean slate. Just a fair read.

The People Who Inspire Me

Neil Armstrong. My hero. The man who stepped onto the moon and made it look like showing up for work. No theatrics. No ego. Just a pilot from Ohio doing the most extraordinary thing a human being has ever done with the quiet professionalism of someone who understood that the mission was bigger than the man.

John Williams because he wrote the theme to my childhood. Every score, every movement, every note placed exactly where it needed to be. He's the reason I wanted to be a Maestro. He's still the standard I measure emotional precision against.

Christopher Hitchens, who refused to let a comfortable lie stand unchallenged. He wrote and spoke with a precision that most people can't achieve in a lifetime of trying, and he did it while staring down everyone in the room who wished he'd stop. He taught me that intellectual courage isn't about being contrarian. It's about being honest when honesty costs you something.

Gary Sinise, who played Lieutenant Dan in Forrest Gump and then spent the rest of his life becoming him. Through the Gary Sinise Foundation, he has dedicated himself to honoring and supporting veterans, first responders, and their families. He didn't just play a wounded veteran on screen. He built an organization that serves them every single day. That's not acting. That's character.

The Man in Front of You

I'm forty years old. I live in Gaithersburg with my wife Kimberly. Our son Josh is graduating this spring from the A. James Clark School of Engineering at the University of Maryland, College Park. Our daughter Paige is at Virginia Tech. We share the house with five cats and a dog. I work out of offices in Hagerstown, Gaithersburg, and Port Charlotte, Florida.

I am the product of Western Maryland, of four grandparents who showed up every day and did the work without needing anyone to notice, of a mother who spent fifteen years fighting for the people she loved and taught me that what's right is right, of a father who proved that kindness and laughter and showing up on time aren't small things, and of a stepfather who showed me that family is a choice you make every day.

I spent my thirties building skills. I'm spending my forties building something worthy of the people who made me.