It started in New York kitchens.
I spent more than ten years in New York restaurant kitchens, working my way up to Executive Chef. That meant running the team, training new cooks, building the schedule, costing the menu and doing the purchasing, while dinner service kept coming.
A kitchen doesn’t wait until you’re ready. When something breaks in the middle of a Friday night, you fix it with what you have, and it doesn’t matter whose job it was. That’s where I learned to stay calm, own the problem and get it done.
Later I helped launch a restaurant franchise in Medellín, where I owned the kitchen and the marketing. It was the first time I ran both sides of a business at once: making the product, and getting people through the door.
Ten years inside other people’s businesses.
I started taking my own clients in 2015, doing digital marketing for startups and small businesses: SEO and analytics, content, email, funnels, the social accounts, keeping their websites up to date. Clients ranged from people starting something in a spare room to established businesses with real budgets.
Having no boss didn’t mean answering to nobody. It meant answering to six or eight people at once, any of whom could leave at the end of the month. That turns out to be a harder manager than an actual manager.
Read a client wrong and you find out inside a month, because they stop paying you.
For two years I was also a senior project manager at a web and marketing firm, running ten to fifteen client projects at a time with designers, writers and a remote development team. The useful part wasn’t the projects. It was learning to stand between somebody who wanted something and the people who had to build it.
Then software companies. At Salesbox I onboarded B2B clients. At OpenBOM I did the marketing for a software product and ended up on the phone with people in the middle of their free trial, asking what they were trying to do and where they got stuck. Nobody hired me for that part. The scope kept widening until it was mine.
Those years taught me the difference between what somebody asks for and what they actually need. Most of the time, that gap is exactly where things get stuck.
Then I built a house in the mountains near Guatapé.
I bought land in a country where I didn’t know how buying land worked, and figured it out. I designed the house and the interior myself, then planned everything underneath it: water, electricity, the septic system, the permits and licenses. The crew I hired only did the building. Finding and pricing every material was on me.
Then I lived there for three years. A New York city boy learning to raise chickens and rabbits and grow his own food.
It’s the same thing I do for clients. When I don’t know how to do something, I learn it. Then I work out every piece and see it through until it’s done.
What I do now.
My latest big project is Crewli, software for running restaurant operations, which I co-founded with my business partner. I’m not an engineer. I build with AI, and that let us take Crewli from an idea to a business that now runs day to day without much input from me.
That frees me up for what I do now: working with startups and small businesses as the extra set of hands. Marketing, projects, product, customers, internal tools, websites. Whatever is stuck, I figure out what needs to happen and get it moving, for a few hours a month or a lot more. It’s just me, so you work with me directly, from the first call to the finished job.
