I grew up on job sites. Then I spent ten years inside a marketing company.

My dad owns a drywall company in Oneonta, New York. I grew up hauling board and hearing him take calls at dinner. When the phone didn't ring, everyone in the house knew.

After that I took a job at a marketing company that was two people: the owner and me. I was the only developer. I stayed ten years. When I left, the company had 40 people and I was the CTO. In that time I worked on more than 70 online stores, some of them brands you might recognize, and on the sites of hundreds of smaller businesses that came through the door.

That job taught me two things. The first is what makes a stranger pick up the phone or hit "buy", because I got to test it on millions of visitors. The second is how agencies work from the inside: what gets sold, what gets delivered, and how big the gap between the two can get. I don't say that to trash anyone. Most of the people I worked with were good at their jobs. But I watched a lot of small businesses pay for reports they never read and "campaigns" nobody could explain.

Why I went back to job sites

When I left, the first site I built was my dad's. He's the hardest client I'll ever have, because he knows where I live and he doesn't care about websites. He cares if the phone rings. That site now has a page for every service in every town he'll drive to, and a private page where he can see every call and form on his phone.

Two sealcoating companies saw it and asked for the same thing. That's how this business started. I didn't set out to be a "contractor web guy". It's just the world I'm from, and the one where I can tell in a minute whether a site is doing its job.

What I won't tell you

I won't tell you I can fix everything. I can't turn a bad month around by Friday, and I will never know your trade the way you do. What I can do is make sure that when someone in your town looks for what you do, they find you, they can reach you in one tap, and you can see that it happened. That's the whole job, and it's the one I'm good at.

I work alone on purpose, from Upstate New York. I don't hire overseas and I don't plan to grow into an agency. I've already done that once.

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