The story (so far)

For as long as I can remember, I’ve loved building things. It started as a kid with Legos, Lincoln Logs, Erector sets, models, rockets, robots—anything I could get my hands on. I was always taking things apart to understand how they worked and dissecting the world around me in my mind to try and figure out how everything fit together.

As I grew older, I spent a lot of time around computers. My dad always had the latest technology in the house, allowing me to tinker with nearly every popular computer and software from the late ‘80s through the 2000s. I’d get lost for hours figuring out how everything worked and what everything did.

In the early 2000s, I discovered Apple computers. I was immediately drawn to them and knew I had to have one. During a Christmas visit during high school to my dad in California, on a whim, he took me to the Apple Store in Palo Alto and bought me my first Apple computer: a 17” PowerBook G4. I was completely hooked.

That obsession turned into nearly twenty years of hands-on maker/founder/CEO experience—from front-end development to operations management, from co-founding startups to building acquisition-worthy products, from working in England to creating businesses that scale without constant oversight.

I’ve created, optimized and sold multiple digital businesses—from co-founding a social media analytics platform that was acquired in 2010 to bootstrapping, scaling and eventually selling Good Work in 2024.

I started Good Work because I was good at building websites, and over that ten-plus-year period I had a crash course in what it actually takes to optimize a digital service business to be successful, scalable and sellable.

I learned to delegate effectively and build predictable processes and systems to minimize issues. I automated time-consuming tasks while preserving the human touch, and found ways to differentiate our work and positioning that attracted higher-quality clients, projects and employees.

Ten years in, I was sitting on a seven-figure business with above-industry-average profitability and retention rates, working with clients like Tito’s, PBS, Caesar’s Entertainment, and 150+ other businesses—all while requiring just 5-10 hours of my time per week.

The complete opposite of where I’d started as a solo freelancer working 60+ hour weeks!

Currently, I’m doing a few things: building products and services that scratch my own itch (like Braindrop), and providing my expertise and experiences as a service to help other entrepreneurs and small business owners do what I’ve done: get out of the weeds and build scalable, more profitable businesses that they can work on, rather than in.

I write about what’s worked for me, like ‘Principles and concepts to optimize your service business,’ on this blog.

My deep understanding and curiosity on how things work and exploring how they can be improved is what I do. I can see an idea through from ideation to completion. I can see the bottlenecks that are holding a business back both visually and systematically. I often can take a problem, run through countless scenarios, anticipate the chain reactions each choice might trigger, and find the best path forward—often with little hesitation.

My work has continually evolved, but has always revolved around making. Rather than choosing a certain way of doing things (or what exactly to do) up front, I’ve learned from everything that’s come my way and adjusted accordingly, fully understanding that the road isn’t straight, but incredibly windy, getting closer to my purpose with every step.