In 1994 I stood in a hotel conference room in New York telling a group of business owners they needed a website. One of them told me the internet was a farce and would not be around the following year.
I am having the same conversation again now, about AI, with the same kind of person. It still catches me off guard every time.
I was born in 1967 in the Black Forest, in a small town near Freiburg, and I stayed there until I was eighteen. Then Berlin, to study physical therapy. Three years learning it, two more practising it in a retirement home.
Which means I spent my twenties with my hands on people who could no longer do easily what they had done without thinking for sixty years.
I bring it up because it shaped everything after it. You do not walk into a room like that and open with your method. You ask what the person in front of you is trying to do today, and then you work backwards.
In September 1990 I emigrated to the United States. New York first, about a year in Los Angeles, then back to New York. In 1993 I built my first website.
For context on what that meant at the time: a T1 line ran around fifteen hundred dollars a month and gave you roughly one and a half megabits. Slower than the phone in your pocket, and more expensive than most people's rent.
After New York came a long stretch in South Florida. Since around 2020 I have worked from Cuernavaca, in Mexico, which is where I am now. Thirty-three years in, and the interesting part has never been the technology.
In the early Google years I built dynamic pages stuffed with keywords. Thousands of them. They ranked on the front page within hours. The indexing crawl hit my own server so hard it kept going down.
It felt like I had found a door nobody else had noticed.
Then Google shipped its first major update, and my income dropped about ninety-five percent, month over month.
I do not tell that story for sympathy. I tell it because it is the reason I build the way I build now.
Everything I had was rented. The rankings were rented, the traffic was rented, and the thing underneath them was never mine to keep. When the landlord changed the locks there was nothing left standing.
So whatever I build for a client, the client owns. Their database, their accounts, their knowledge. If they ever want to fire me they should be able to walk away with all of it. That is not generosity. It is the only lesson I have ever paid ninety-five percent of my income for.
Most people approach it like a tool they need to learn the buttons on. It is much closer to learning a language. In 2023 prompt engineering was a named discipline with courses attached to it, and inside about two years it had dissolved back into ordinary clear communication, because that is all it ever was.
My first career was physical therapy, in a retirement home in Berlin. You do not do the walking for someone. You build the thing that lets them go further than they could yesterday. I have never once wanted to build a system that removes a person from their own business, and I am not going to start now.
Models get replaced every few months. What compounds is what a business knows about itself, written down in a form that outlives whichever model is currently winning. Own that and you get better every year no matter what happens to the tools.
People overselling AI is tiring, but I understand why they do it. The harder thing to watch is somebody deciding not to try to understand it at all. I have seen that decision made before, in 1994, and I watched what it cost the people who made it.
I became a certified seminar speaker in the United States in the nineties, which is how I ended up in that hotel room in 1994 in the first place. Since then I have spent a lot of years in Chamber of Commerce and BNI rooms, which is where you find out very quickly whether you can explain what you do to somebody who does not care about it yet.
I shot video for plastic surgeons through the nineties and two-thousands, including some of the first things they ever put on YouTube. I still produce video now. Different tools, same job.
I mention all of this for one reason. My whole position is that AI is a communication skill rather than a software skill. That is not a clever line I landed on recently. It is the only conclusion left after thirty-three years of watching the technology change completely while the hard part stayed exactly where it always was.
I build Future Ops. It starts as a website, because the website is the one thing every business already owns and already quietly suspects is letting them down.
But almost all business software works the same way. It waits for something to happen and then responds. A form arrives, an email goes out. Useful, and exactly as clever in year three as it was on day one.
What I want to build works the other way round. Something that notices what is about to happen while there is still time to do something about it. The customer who is due. The quote that has gone quiet. The slow week that is three weeks out rather than already here.
That is the whole idea, and it is why the company is called Future Growth Now.
Thirty minutes, my own calendar, and I will come prepared. Bring the thing that is actually costing you money and we will use the time well, whether you ever work with me or not.
