When you call, you get a person. Not a call center.

I grew up in Colorado, and after college I landed in Dallas doing what a lot of people do to pay rent. Waiting tables, bartending. I got good at it. Good enough to run the bar for Pappas Restaurants, Inc., one of the largest family-owned restaurant groups in the country, the company behind Texas names like Pappadeaux Seafood Kitchen, Pappasito's Cantina, and Pappas Bros. Steakhouse. Instead of climbing the management ladder there, I started training the managers on how to actually take care of a guest. That's the part I cared about.

That path took me somewhere I never expected: Prime Italian, the Prime Hotel in Miami Beach, and Monkey Bar in New York. Monkey Bar is one of the oldest rooms in the city, where the lunch crowd on any given Tuesday might be the most powerful room in Manhattan, not just a table. We ran movie premiere parties, celebrity events, corporate functions for names like Comcast, nights with politicians in the room and Secret Service on deck. I wasn't cooking the food or running the company. I was the person making sure every single detail of someone's experience landed right, no matter who was watching.

That's a skill. It doesn't show up on a resume, but you either have it or you don't. I have it. Everything I build now, I build with that same instinct.

While I was working at Monkey Bar, I got sick. Really sick. Diagnosed with ulcerative colitis, I was given two options: have the surgery, or die in two or three months.

Coming out of the procedure still groggy, someone told me to go grab a sandwich at the deli across the street and order a ginger ale. Something in me just knew that was wrong. Not wrong in a small way. Wrong in a way that told me nobody in that room actually understood what was happening to my body. Years in that environment (the food, the alcohol, the late nights that come with the restaurant life) had caught up with me. And the fix wasn't going to come from someone else's advice. It was going to come from me learning it myself.

I had one thing going for me: time, and YouTube. I told myself I could learn anything. So I did, health, nutrition, how the body actually works. That belief, that you can learn your way into fixing anything if you're willing to put in the hours, is the exact same belief this whole company is built on. The only difference is, now I've got AI to help me learn it a thousand times faster. What used to take me a year of late nights now takes an afternoon. I can point AI at 200 hours of research and ask it questions like it's a person who read every page. It's not a gimmick to me. It's the same tool that got me my life back, aimed at your business instead.

Getting healthy led me somewhere I didn't expect either. I trained under one of the country's leading names in flexibility and movement, and started working with people at the top of their fields: a scientist recognized by Time magazine, an owner of professional sports teams, others like them. Eventually one relationship became a full-time, all-in operation: nutrition, training, and travel logistics for a client with two private jets. Flights, hotels, meals, rentals. If it touched his life, I made sure it worked.

It was the best training I could have asked for. When someone is paying you to remove every friction point from their life, you learn exactly what "taken care of" really means. It nearly broke my body doing it for one person. So I stepped back, traveled, and started asking a different question: how do I do this for a lot of people instead of just one?

AI is the answer I found. Simple AI Strategies is that same instinct, rebuilt to scale.

Before I brought this to Lake Norman at scale, I built real systems for real businesses: a website and social media plan for a wellness business, complete with a booking calendar and a front desk that never sleeps. A website for a major architectural and venue design firm, one of the sharpest in the country at what they do. A social media campaign for a wellness company. Every one of them got a system built specifically for how they actually work, not a template with their logo slapped on it.

I'm not stopping there. I'm just getting started.

I spent months in the wiring: connecting one tool to another, paying for servers, digging through automation templates so generic and cluttered they looked like a car with wires hanging out of the dash, nobody sure what half of them even did. Most of what's sold as "AI automation" right now is exactly that: someone else's template, copied and pasted, that nobody actually understands. When it breaks, and it will, the business owner who bought it is on their own.

I learned to build first. Then I learned to use AI to build better and faster. "Simple" isn't a description of the technology, what's running underneath is genuinely sophisticated. It's a promise about your experience of it. One system. One place to see your calls, texts, emails, reviews, and social media. One app on your phone. Something you'll actually open and use every day, instead of another tool that sits there ignored.

This community is different — people are genuinely kind here, and I want to be part of it, not just sell to it. Local business owners in this area are used to getting marketing from agencies out of Charlotte who don't know their name and never will. I'm not that. I'm nearby. I'm accessible. You know me.

Whether it be in person, on the phone, or on the computer, we'll build this together. You're not handed off to someone you'll never meet. I'm building real relationships in this area, the kind where you do good work for someone, they tell their friends, and everybody wins. I'm building that referral loop the right way too — when you send someone my way, I take care of you for it.

If I do a bad job for you, you won't tell anyone, and you'd be right not to. So I'm not going to let that happen.

I hike Rock Springs Nature Preserve most mornings. It's thinking time: steps, ideas, working through a problem out loud before the day gets loud. Some mornings it's just quiet, and a chance to listen.

I'm a homebody at heart, which is probably why Lake Norman fits me the way it does. I'm not chasing the next city. I found the one I want to build in.

20 minutes. We'll come ready with a demo based on your business.