I've spent thirty years building real things. Now I build the software too.

I was five years old the first time I worked for my father's concrete business. By ten I was digging ditches. That's not a metaphor I reach for — it's where the work actually started, and it's why I've never been able to take a business seriously from a slide deck.

Since then: I've built homes as a contractor. I ran a manufactured-home dealership and set the homes myself — on the crew, in the dirt, dealing with the permit office and the hauler and the customer who was promised the moon by a salesman. I bought a Playa Bowls franchise and learned what it costs to run inside someone else's system. I invented a piece of heavy-equipment hardware and pushed it all the way through to a granted U.S. patent. And I wrote a book about why 97% of family businesses are gone by the fourth generation — because I have five kids, and I'd rather teach them to build than hand them something to inherit.

Between all of our companies over the last thirty years, we've done more than $35 million in revenue. I mention it only because it's the difference between theorizing about how a business runs and having actually run one.

Then AI got good enough to matter, and I did the thing nobody in my industry does: I learned to build the software myself. Not a hobby project — a real product, Osqr, that I ship and sell.

What I found is that the businesses I came from — construction, housing, trades, franchises — are exactly the ones getting left behind, and exactly the ones with the most to gain. They don't need another dashboard. They need someone who understands both the jobsite and the codebase, and there turn out to be very few of us.

So that's what I do now.