My family made aircraft parts
Not a boutique. Not a lifestyle brand. A manufacturing shop that made aircraft parts for defense contractors.
My family ran it, and I watched what it took to keep it alive: the bids, the margins, the constant pressure of knowing one lost contract changed everything.
That's where I learned what small business actually means. Not the version you read about in entrepreneurship books. The real version, where the owner is the salesperson, the manager, the problem-solver, and the one lying awake at 2am trying to figure out how to make payroll this week.
The shop closed in 1998.
Then I spent 28 years on the other side
Most of that was inside big companies. Marketing, sales operations, IT. I ran the email campaigns, built the lead generation funnels, implemented the CRM systems. Big teams, bigger budgets.
I watched enterprises use systems, tools, and infrastructure that most small business owners couldn't access, couldn't afford, and in many cases didn't even know existed.
Twice I stepped out to try it myself. A CRM consultancy in 2005, implementing Salesforce.com and Microsoft Dynamics CRM for businesses a lot like yours. Then a digital marketing agency in 2011.
Neither turned into something huge. What they gave me was the part you can't learn inside a big company: what it actually feels like to build something with no budget, no team, and nobody to lend a hand.
I'd grown up watching the smaller side of that fight. Now I was watching the bigger side win it. That gap always bothered me.
Then I built AI capability inside a Fortune 200
Thirteen of those years were in pharmaceutical commercial operations, at companies including a Fortune 200. I built the CRM platforms, ran the commercial analytics, and stood up an internal AI capability for the company.
That's where I learned what actually makes AI work inside a business, and it is almost never the technology. It's the process it's pointed at, the people who have to use it, and whether anyone trained them. I watched plenty of well-funded AI work go nowhere for exactly those reasons.
AI closed that gap.
For the first time, a small business owner has access to the same leverage that used to require a marketing department. The same research capabilities. The same content production. The same follow-up systems.
One person with the right tools can now do what used to take a team of five.
Most small business owners know AI is important. What they don't have is someone to show them exactly where it fits, how to use it practically, and how to build it into a system that actually runs.
That's what I do.