I have spent thirty-three years helping businesses get found, and then helping them work better once they are. The web, then social, then mobile and the cloud. Now AI.
The tools changed every few years. The question never did. In 1994 and again this year, a business owner asked me some version of the same thing: can people find us, and does it turn into revenue? I lead the diagnosis on every engagement, and I stay on the build.
I grew up in the Black Forest and moved to Berlin at eighteen to study physical therapy. For two years after that I worked as a physical therapist in a home for older people. My first career was restoring function to people who had lost it.
In September 1990 I got on a plane to New York with a one-way ticket. Three years later I was building websites, and everything since has been a version of that same job.
Grew up in Emmendingen, near Freiburg in the Black Forest, until I was eighteen.
Moved to Berlin to study physical therapy, then worked for two years as a physical therapist in a home for older people.
Left Germany in September with no return flight. About a year in Los Angeles, then back to New York.
Building for the web from the thirty-fourth floor of the Empire State Building. Grey backgrounds, dial-up, floppy disks to get a connection working. Most clients wanted their printed brochure retyped onto a screen, and the hard part was convincing an owner a website was worth having at all.
I ran a seminar at a hotel in Manhattan and a man in the audience told me the whole thing was a farce. I don't remember what I said back to him. But I remember standing there thinking, you have no idea what's coming.
Websites and video for plastic surgeons, and getting that video onto YouTube early. Later, web, infrastructure, search and Google Ads for treatment centers, with ad budgets running into tens of thousands of dollars a month.
I told a client to start. In 2026 he called me. His words: “I wish I would have followed your advice.”
Moved to Mexico, which is where I work from today, with clients wherever they are.
Working with AI models daily, and treating it from the start as a communication skill rather than a software skill. The quality lives in the context you give it, not in clever phrasing.
Built Super Brain and Business Brain: one searchable record of everything a business has done, decided and learned, which an AI can actually use.
Published The Next Version of Your Business Is Already Here, about finding your next revenue opportunity in the tools and records you already own.
It was, can people find you? I had that conversation in a Manhattan hotel in 1994 and I have it now, about AI. Basically the same words. Just the different scenario. A different person.
The first version of any new medium is the old one copied over. Everybody's first website was their brochure, retyped. Most people's first go at AI is their website, pasted into a chat window. Same mistake, thirty years apart, and I was in the room for both.
“The problem is, it's never where most business owners are looking.”
“Before you hire anybody, and I mean me included.”
“I work month for month. No long term agreements or contracts. I need to prove myself to you. A trusted relationship is built on trust and follow through.”
“There has to be the human in the loop.”
“Use AI every day. But before you ask it anything, give it real context. Connect your files, your folders, the documents your business actually runs on. Without that, it is answering a stranger. This is the biggest revolution I have ever seen, and it will be life-changing for the people who learn to use it this way.”
Anyone who has been doing this for thirty-three years has been wrong about things. These are three of mine, and each one still shapes how I work.
In the early Google years I built search pages that ranked within hours. Then the first major Google update landed and about ninety-five percent of my income went with it. It is why I care so much that clients own their own channels, data and logins.
In the mid nineties I told a nose surgeon to buy rhinoplasty.com for about a hundred dollars a year. I was finding domains like acting.com for myself, and let a lot of them go because I could not always afford to renew. What are they worth now? A lot more than a hundred dollars. A lot more.
The YouTube call in 2007 was good advice. I cannot tell that story without the other half: I'm not going to pretend I'm the master of it. I procrastinate on things many, many times.
I am a certified seminar speaker and spent years active in the Chamber of Commerce and BNI. I also hosted Dual Horizons, a podcast about spirituality, AI and technology.
My book, free. It is the same thinking I bring to every engagement, written so you can put it to work on your own business before you ever talk to me. And if you would rather just talk, the Review starts with your actual numbers.
Uncover Your Next Revenue Opportunity with AI, and Prove It with What You Already Own.
You own a business that works. When you decide where the next money goes, you are usually choosing between two or three proposals, and everyone who wrote one is right about their own part and silent about the rest. I wrote this book because there is now a way to check first. The evidence is already sitting in the tools and spreadsheets you pay for, and your business has become something you can ask, in plain English.
Fourteen chapters, one exercise each, finishable in a single sitting, using only what you already own.
