The whole arc, in order.
No highlight reel. The list, the prison, the framework, the exit, and what came after.
2012 – 2014
The Apprenticeship
A technical sales degree from Weber State in 2010, then 180Fusion. Fifty-plus ad accounts at once, entry level to team manager in six months. You physically cannot manage fifty accounts without process.
That's where the systems thinking started. Not from a book. From necessity. Systems weren't aspirational. They were survival.
2014
The List
Every Google Ads agency tries to win customers through Google Ads. It's an auction, and everyone is bidding in the same one. So I went offline. Bought 150,000 to 200,000 business domains from SEMrush and SpyFu, filtered to companies already spending at least $1,000 a month on ads. Cross-referenced WHOIS records for owner names and cell phones. Built an overseas cold calling team to book the appointments.
About $30,000 in data. But those businesses were already sold on Google Ads. I never had to sell the concept. Only the management fee.
2014 – 2021
The Prison
Atria Media Group scaled to seven figures. Google Partner. 100+ small businesses. A team of 30 spread across the world. And me at the center of all of it, 60+ hours a week. Every quote, every client escalation, every hire ran through me.
The quoting process alone burned 12 hours a week. A part-time job buried inside the business that nobody questions, because that's just how it's done.
2021
The Framework
So I built the BEST Systems Framework. Build. Edit. Software Automation. Task Delegation. Documented everything. Automated what could be automated. Delegated what couldn't.
The team went from 30 to 5. Net profit went up. My week went from 60 hours to under 3.
2021
The Proof
Then I spent a month in Costa Rica with my family. The business didn't miss a beat. Not a dashboard metric or a KPI. A month in another country with my kids while the machine kept running.
That trip is what convinced me the framework wasn't an efficiency play. It was a freedom plan.
"SEOWerkz wasn't buying me. They were buying a machine that ran without me."
2021 – 2023
The Pattern
After the exit, I consulted. Fractional operations for agencies and tech companies. Different industries, same wound: the processes were locked in the founder's head.
They'd tried AI. ChatGPT gave generic output because it didn't know their process. Zapier sat unused because nobody knew what to automate first. Every tool assumed the foundation was already there. It wasn't.
You can't build a roof without a foundation. Nobody was pouring foundations.
After the exit
The Line
When OpenAI signed a surveillance contract with the Department of Defense, I cut them from my entire stack. Every product, every workflow, every client recommendation moved to Anthropic.
It cost me time and money. I'd do it again. The tools you build a business on are a values decision, and mine have to be defensible.
2024 – Present
The Build
Now I build Aperture OS. AI agents that research your business, find your highest-impact automation, map every step through one conversation, and hand you a verified implementation plan. The conversation is the product.
Not a chatbot. Not a Zapier alternative. The step before those tools. The step everyone keeps skipping.
How I Think About AI
The models are commodities.
The thinking is not.
01
How would a brain do this?
Asked before 'how should code do this.' Memory, observation, consolidation. The architecture copies the organ, not the org chart.
02
Intelligence over code.
If an intelligence can read something and decide, let it. Code routes the data. The minds do the thinking.
03
The moat is the scar tissue.
Anyone can wire up the same models. The moat is craft, experience, and prompts. Not mechanism.
Why I Build
I build AI machines that do for your business what I did for mine, back when I had to do it without AI.
If your business runs on what's in your head, I know that prison. I designed one myself. Thirty minutes, no pitch: tell me what's broken and I'll tell you what I'd fix first.