The Leap

For a while, my job was to predict what was coming. Chief strategy officer at an agency inside one of the big publicly held holding companies. Read the tea leaves, tell the clients what happens next.

So I read them. And what I saw coming was automation, moving straight through the kind of work we did. Designers first. Videographers. Copywriters. Not in twenty years. Soon.

We are both congenitally optimistic, which is either a strength or a diagnosis. Our parents told us we could do anything we set our minds to. Nobody warned us we’d take it literally at forty, with four children and a mortgage. So alongside the fear was a question we couldn’t put down: what if you brought this technology somewhere nobody was pointing it? Not another agency. Somewhere physical. Somewhere with dust in it.

I’d like to say we were brave. Mostly we were scared. Audrey and I spent two years circling the exit before we took it. Business advisors. A software startup that almost had me as a cofounder. A book about buying a company instead of starting one, written by somebody here in Saint Louis, which I read the way you read a map when you’re already lost.

In twenty twenty-two, we bought a countertop shop.

We borrowed against everything. A traditional SBA loan, the kind where the house is on the table. Looking back, we probably paid too much. In our defense, we were very confident. Confidence is not the same as information, it turns out.

The next four years taught us things nobody warned us about. That stone breaks. That labor is the whole business. That a supplier can change your prices on a Tuesday and you have one week to decide whether you still have a company.

Here’s the part nobody tells you: being right and being paid for it are years apart. We called it, then we sat in the shop wondering when the call would cash. Two years of is-it-working, is-it-working. Then, sometime in twenty twenty-five, it started working. The LiDAR work matured. The systems we’d bolted in — the workspace, the tracking, the process — finally had something to run on. We could put agents on real work. And the shop got quietly, undeniably leaner.

The relief of that is hard to describe.

The technology that was going to hollow out the agency business is the same technology that lets a small shop in Imperial, Missouri quote like a company ten times its size. We didn’t escape it. We brought it with us and pointed it at the small end of the market instead of the large one.

Four years in, the shop is bigger, leaner, and doing work it had no business winning. National retail rollouts for Warby Parker and J.Jill. Costco’s preferred fabricator across the region. Fewer people, more revenue, better systems.

We were right about what was coming. The agency I left is gone now. So is the network above it. What we were wrong about was what it meant.

We’re still scared, for the record. We just get in over our heads deliberately now.