About me — the story
I build engines that grow service businesses.
One skill, compounding across every chapter: find where a business leaks time, money, or trust — then build the system that stops the leak and turns it into growth. Lately, the system is increasingly made of AI.
Ch. 01 — The startup
Talent, from zero.
I was the inaugural talent hire at NJOY, where I built the talent function from nothing at a startup that went on to sell for $2.75 billion. First lesson, learned early: growth isn’t a marketing outcome — it’s an operations outcome. The companies that scale are the ones where someone has built the machine that finds, closes, and keeps great people.
Ch. 02 — The desk
Learning to close.
At Green Key I ran a desk and then a team as Manager of the Pharma Division, serving top-25 pharmaceutical clients. Recruiting at that level is a pure sales and relationship craft: demanding buyers, long cycles, zero tolerance for sloppiness. Everything I now know about closing, account care, and keeping promises under pressure was formed there.
Ch. 03 — The firm
Seventeen businesses, one operating layer.
Today I’m COO of DBM Legal Services — a seven-figure, nationwide, fully remote corporate law firm with 17 fee-earning attorneys. The operating layer — delivery, technology, talent, finance ops, growth — is run by me, a part-time resource, and an offshore EA, with AI doing the work of a department. Dozens of concurrent matters, from one-off engagements to multi-year clients. Hundreds of invoices a month, run calm.
The model is the interesting part: each attorney is a business within the business — their own clients, their own book, their own P&L. That flips the org chart. The playbooks, the SOPs, and the DataHub — the firm-wide workflow platform our outside CTO engineered, with me as his integral partner, translating business needs and workflow-optimization opportunities into the features he builds (and, as AI coding tools have matured, increasingly carrying pieces of the build myself) — aren’t supporting infrastructure; they’re the product, and my customers are seventeen entrepreneurs.
My fingerprints are on all three growth levers: I personally recruited every attorney behind the expansion, built the systems that gave the firm capacity to absorb them, and meet biweekly with each attorney on growing their book. Growth = headcount expansion × revenue-per-attorney expansion.
*Excluding the founding partner’s own book — the honest proxy for my impact. I fence my own numbers; you should want an operator who does.
Ch. 04 — The growth lab
The builder proof.
I took a 1968 family trade business with zero digital infrastructure and used it as a lab for the thesis: a traditional small business plus AI leverage, run lean, delivering top-notch service. In about four months of nights and weekends, solo, I built the whole machine — a compliance-focused organic engine, Google Ads running a 14%+ click-through rate against a ~6% industry average at a fraction of market cost per click, 10× search impressions in four months, Jobber end-to-end, AI call screening, a review engine, and a quote follow-up system — because that’s where small businesses actually leak money.
Then I productized the playbook into Back Office Blueprint — back-office-as-a-service for an underserved market of blue-collar business owners, with every proposal shipped as an AI-built interactive micro-site. Take what worked once, systematize it, package it for anyone.
Ch. 05 — The stack
Not an AI enthusiast. An implementer.
I deployed AI inside attorney-client privilege — a harder governance environment than most industries will ever face — and I train top-tier attorneys to use it in their legal workflows. Getting lawyers to adopt AI is a change-management problem with no margin for error; that’s where my operating philosophy formed: adopt at the frontier, pressure-test in real operations, standardize on what holds up. I built my own agent system on OpenClaw the week it launched, ran it in production, then deliberately replaced it with a Claude-first setup. I don’t collect tools — I run an operating philosophy and audit it.
The tools I work in daily — providers and stack, in production, not in bookmarks.