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No one sees a Facebook ad for an injury lawyer and thinks, “You know what, I should get injured this afternoon.” That is not how demand works. It is not how people choose a vet, hire a contractor, call an accountant, pick a dentist, book a mechanic, choose a law firm, hire a home builder,

SEO feels harder now. Good. That probably sounds rude, but I mean it in the most affectionate possible way toward businesses that are actually trying to be useful. The easy version of SEO was always living on borrowed time. Thin pages, keyword stuffing, weird backlink schemes, fake local pages, AI sludge, city-name spam, and service

You can get a website very cheaply now. That is not really controversial. You can go on Fiverr, Upwork, Wix, Squarespace, Webflow, WordPress template marketplaces, AI website builders, or whatever new thing is currently promising to build your entire online presence before lunch. Some of those tools are useful. Some freelancers are talented. Some businesses

The warehouse usually knows where the software is lying. We have learned that from decades of working with companies where the official system says one thing and the people doing the work know something slightly different. The order is marked ready, but the guys on the floor know it is waiting on a part. The

Over the years, we have inherited a lot of software and website systems that technically worked. That phrase, “technically worked,” is doing a lot of work. I have seen systems built by one very capable person who understood every moving part. The site worked. The CMS worked. The custom code worked. The problem was that

I have a strange relationship with AS400 systems. I say AS400 because that is still what most people call them, even though IBM has renamed the platform enough times that keeping track of the branding feels like a small certification exam. AS400, iSeries, System i, IBM i. The names changed. The green screens kept quietly

Early in my career, I worked in QA at Net Integration Technologies on Nitix. The official job title for QA employees was “Evil Death Ray.” That was funny, but it was also more accurate than most job titles. Our job was to find the strange edge cases, bad assumptions, awkward failures, and painful surprises before

Most businesses are still using AI in the least interesting way possible. They are using it to make bad work faster. Faster emails, faster summaries, faster social posts, faster reports, faster code, faster “strategy documents” that look official because they have headings and a table. Somewhere along the way, everyone decided that polished output meant

There is a point in many businesses where the official software is not really the system anymore. The real system is five spreadsheets, three inboxes, one accounting export, a shared folder with suspiciously named files, and a staff member who can somehow explain which version is “the real one” if you ask very nicely and

Businesses get stuck with bad metaphors. A website is one of them. People say, “We need a website,” and often what they mean is, “We need something online that proves we exist.” That used to be enough. A website was a digital brochure. A place for your phone number, services, logo, and maybe a few