I traded the agency commute for one down the hall.

For about a decade, agency life had me. I made it to VP of Paid Media and partner at Rocket55, and I genuinely loved the work — the strategy, the problem-solving, the scramble. What I didn't love was watching my kids grow up over email.

So I stepped back. These days the commute is down the hall, the meetings sometimes get interrupted by someone who needs a juice box, and the work fits around the family instead of the other way around. I expected to miss the grind. I don't. What I do miss — what I couldn't put down — is the itch to take a knotty problem apart and build something that fixes it. That itch is what Sixsmith Digital is for.

Here's what bothers me. The businesses that would gain the most from AI — the two-person shop, the founder doing the books at 11pm, the team where everyone wears four hats — are the ones least likely to get real help with it. The good stuff gets aimed at companies that already have plenty.

I think that's backwards. The person who could get five hours of their week back is exactly the person nobody's building for. So that's who I build for.

The way I work now is hands-on. I'm deep into “vibe coding” — building real software with AI tools, fast — so I can go from “here's the annoying problem” to a working tool in days, not quarters. But a working tool isn't the finish line. Turning a clever one-off into something your business runs on without thinking about it — that's the half I care about most.

Ten years in marketing taught me the best idea is worthless until it's actually running. So I don't stop at the demo.