Writing

Essays, playbooks, and measured findings on building with AI, running agencies, and how work actually gets done - plus personal stories and the opinions I will defend. Much of it published here first, and all of it open.

August 25, 20264 min read

When the Lead Problem Is Not the Lead Problem

Stuck agencies almost always reach the same conclusion: they need more leads. The symptoms point that way. Calls feel harder, proposals stall, win rates drift. But pipeline symptoms can come from four completely different places, and most of them have nothing to do with lead volume. More leads do not fix a broken offer, a differentiation problem, or a founder who is still the system. The diagnostic step is the one most agency advice skips.

agency-operating

August 15, 20264 min read

The Junior Problem

Every senior I ever hired was somebody's junior first. So was I. The junior desk always did two jobs at once: cheap production, and the slow apprenticeship that produced the next generation of seniors. AI is removing the first job fast, and the industry is quietly acting as if the second one never existed. It did. I am the proof, and so is everyone I ever promoted.

agency-operatingai-systems

July 22, 20264 min read

The Automation You Shouldn't Build

I make my living building AI automations. This piece is about the ones I refuse to build - which turns out to be the more useful list. In recent surveys, 42% of companies abandoned most of their AI initiatives. Those projects weren't killed by bad technology. The failures were structural.

ai-systemsagencyplaybook

June 27, 20269 min read

The Instinct Nobody Taught Us Is the One That Matters Now

For twenty-five years I did one thing under different titles: before anything could be built, somebody had to figure out what it was supposed to be. We called it scoping, briefing, judgment, experience - we never had a clean name for it. Then AI made the skill visible, and it turned out to be the one that matters most.

aiagenciesfounder-lessons

June 13, 20267 min read

Why Young Agencies Absorb Bad Client Behaviour, and What Changes When They Stop

A strange thing about running a young agency is that the cost of saying no to a client is always concrete, and the cost of saying yes is always diffuse. Young agencies are not bad at saying no because they lack character - they do not yet have the operating system that makes saying no obvious. I learned this the slow way, on a project that almost ended my agency in its first year.

agenciesfounder-lessons

June 6, 20267 min read

Quality Is Not Positioning, and That Is Why You Are Stuck

For a long time, I believed my agency's edge was the quality of the work. Clients came because of the work, told their friends because of the work, gave us the next project because of the work. Then I started losing pitches to agencies I had not heard of three years earlier, whose work was no better than ours. What I did, for a while, was double down on quality. The output improved. The pitch loss rate did not.

agency-operatingpositioning

May 30, 202613 min read

The Five-day Week Is the Most Expensive Habit in Knowledge Work

I currently work around 60 hours a week, more than I ever did running my digital agency, and I am less tired than I was at 40. That sounds like a paradox until you realise what changed: I stopped working Monday-to-Friday. The five-day week is the most expensive habit in knowledge work, and most employers have no idea what it is costing them.

ways-of-workingessays

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I write regularly on LinkedIn about what I'm building and learning: agency growth, AI development, product judgment, and the messy reality behind making things work.

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