I hate this question — partly because the honest answer is “whichever business needs me most this week,” and partly because every clean version of it sounds like LinkedIn. Today I’m running three: TOT Nail Supply (distribution), TOT Brand Co (brand house), and Pump Daddy (supplements). Before that I shipped 401 TikToks in two years and grew a fitness channel from 124 to 528K followers. The throughline is sales — figuring out what people want and getting it in their hands. Also: still bad at the guitar.

Biochemistry degree at Baylor, no medical school, and a camera. I spent two years posting near-daily fitness content on TikTok, grew an audience from 124 to 528K, then in September 2022 converted it into an apparel brand that sold $211K over sixteen months before I wound it down. From there the pattern repeated with different products and different audiences — nail supply distribution, a supplements line, a brand house spanning nail, spa, and fragrance products. Every one of them started as “I can see what’s missing here” and ended up a business. I didn’t plan any of this from a deck. I followed what worked.

I look for businesses leaving money on the table because nobody bothered to do the obvious thing well — a brand that ships solid product but writes copy like a 1990s wholesale catalog, a creator with 400K followers and a Linktree where a storefront should be, a founder whose taste is great but whose funnel is held together with tape. The fix is usually unsexy: better photography, a cleaner funnel, a story that doesn’t make the buyer do extra work. Right now I’m interested in putting AI to work inside small operating businesses without making them sound like every other AI-built startup.

Start before the plan is finished. I’ve watched too many smart people spend three months on a deck for something they could have shipped a rough draft of in a week and learned more from. My version of strategy is iteration — get the worst acceptable version into the world, look at what it tells me, throw out the parts that don’t work, keep going. The Lifting Society storefront launched on a Shopify theme I customized myself over a weekend. It cleared $20K in its first full month. The polish came later, paid for by the version that wasn’t polished.

Like a junior employee I never have to manage — fast, eager, capable of being helpful or catastrophically wrong, best when I treat it as such. I use Claude for product copy, customer support drafts, spreadsheet logic, the code for this website, and most of the operational glue that used to require a small team. The trick isn’t “using AI” — that’s table stakes now — it’s still having taste. AI lets you ship ten versions in the time it used to take to ship one. If your taste is bad, that’s just ten bad versions, faster.

I’m a better one-person shop than I am a manager — at least, I was. The Lifting Society sold $211K of apparel over sixteen months and I still wound it down, partly because I scaled the content side by hiring contractors I didn’t know how to direct. I’d hand off a brief, get back something that wasn’t quite it, redo it myself at 2am, and convince myself this was efficiency. It wasn’t. The lesson wasn’t “don’t delegate” — it was that delegation is a skill, not a button you press when you’re tired. I’m working on it. Slowly, on purpose.

Financial intelligence — reading a P&L the way someone with an MBA reads a P&L, modeling cash flow three quarters out, knowing on instinct when a unit-economics story is being told to me wrong. I can run a business; I’m still learning to read one. It’s the thing I’m spending the most study time on this year, which is humbling in the way that studying always is when you’ve been winging it for a while. If we end up working together and this is your strength, you’ll be appreciated and actually listened to — not nodded at and overruled.

Founders, operators, and creatives who would rather ship a rough version on Friday than a perfect version next quarter. People who’ve actually run something — a storefront, a channel, a service business, a product line — and have the scars to prove it. I trust people faster when they can describe a failure in detail than when they can describe a success in detail; the first is harder to fake. If that’s you, the contact page has my email. I’d rather hear from one person who built something small than ten who thought about building something big.