— THE TEAM —
Built by researchers. Run by people who've done the work.
Ashton Ellis
Co-Founder & Strategy Lead
Finance & Marketing · Towson University
Ashton leads client strategy, GEO research, and business development at MAKIF. He designed the MAKIF-46 Framework — a 46-signal audit methodology across five layers: Trust, Entity, Retrieval, Citation, and Measurement — after conducting a pilot audit of over 46 law firms in the Baltimore-Towson market. His methodology draws directly on the KDD '24 GEO research published by Princeton and Columbia University researchers, the Microsoft RAG Evaluation Survey, and Google's E-E-A-T guidelines. Ashton translates AI search science into measurable visibility outcomes for Maryland law firms: identifying exactly which signals are missing, ranking fixes by impact, and building the entity presence that causes AI systems to recommend a firm by name. He studies Finance and Marketing at Towson University.
Wayne Shields
Co-Founder & Operations Lead
Entrepreneurship & Marketing · Towson University
Wayne manages client outreach, delivery operations, and agency partnerships at MAKIF. He built the infrastructure behind every client engagement — the audit delivery pipeline, CRM workflow, and quality assurance process that ensure projects ship on time and clients have clear visibility into their progress at every step. When a law firm receives its MAKIF-46 Audit, Wayne has coordinated the schema implementation reviews, content restructuring timelines, and follow-up communication that turn a scored report into an executed plan. He studies Entrepreneurship and Marketing at Towson University, where his focus on operational systems and partnership development directly informs how MAKIF structures its client engagements.