From Corporate IT to Helping Small Business Owners

At the end of 2023, after almost 30 years in corporate IT, I resigned from my full-time job. I found technology consulting work online, but missed the face-to-face, in-person interactions that I had in the corporate world. And I wanted to do something more meaningful with the second half of my life.

When I joined the Concord Chamber of Commerce and started talking with small business owners, the most common theme I came across is that running a small business by yourself, or with a small team, is especially difficult because there never seems to be enough time to get everything done.

After hearing their stories, and having had so many years of corporate experience, I knew that many of these owners were struggling with inefficiencies that small process or technology changes could fix, often with tools they already had. But they didn't know those options existed.

I'd spent my career setting up exactly these kinds of systems, and explaining them to people who didn't want to become tech people. So I decided to spend the second half of it fixing these problems for small business owners directly.

The part I like most is helping someone fix a problem and showing them how it works along the way, without making them feel bad for not knowing something they never needed to know.

They'll apologize for being tech-illiterate, as though they're supposed to know these things for some reason. But I tell them they don't need to be. That's what I'm for. I'm not an expert in their line of business either, and that's okay.

Today that work is a short menu of fixed-price fixes, and the place to start is Fix One Thing.