Insights

Lessons from 25 years of operating, building, and figuring things out the hard way.

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I Built My Wife a Birthday Card with AI

May 2026 · 4 min read

Her birthday was today. I had 6 hours. I used AI to scrape her public Facebook posts, analyze a screen recording, extract a year of real moments, and turn it into a live interactive infographic. Here's exactly how I did it.

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🏗️ Real Estate

We Started a Hotel Company the Day America Shut Down

April 2026 · 7 min read

Three partners. Seven hotel deals. One meeting at a corporate headquarters that would shut down before we got home. And the pivot that turned it all into 15 Scooter's Coffee locations in under 3 years.

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🤖 AI & Automation

I Built a Self-Learning Website for My Own Company

April 2026 · 7 min read

We had four websites. None of them talked to each other. Our catering leads lived on sticky notes. So I killed all four and built one site with a brain.

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🤖 AI & Automation

I Was Building SaaS Before Most People Knew What SaaS Was

April 2026 · 6 min read

I moved home to a town of 10,000 to save my marriage. Found a software startup. Built it into one of the largest cloud-based EHR platforms in the country.

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☕ Operations

The Night Before Opening That Nobody Talks About

March 2026 · 5 min read

My CFO and I were cutting sink holes in stainless steel tables on-site at midnight in Wisconsin. Nobody posts this part of franchising.

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🚢 Supply Chain

My Spreadsheet Died in the Pacific Ocean

March 2026 · 6 min read

In 2018, Trump's tariffs hit mid-ocean and turned every job red in real time. Here's what I built, what I missed, and what AI would have changed completely.

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