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 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.