Owner-operator since 2013. Here's how the systems on this site actually got built.
I own NW Maids — residential cleaning, about $5M a year, five cities, more than 100 cleaners in the field. I've run it since 2013. The back office is three people. All of us work remotely, including me.
I started it from scratch in 2013 with no background in the industry. I had never run a cleaning company, never worked in one, and knew nothing about how residential cleaning is scheduled, priced, or staffed. I learned all of it by getting it wrong in public, one market at a time.
That turns out to be the reason the systems on this site exist. Someone who came up in the industry inherits how it's done. I had to build every process from nothing, which meant I was always looking at the operation as a set of problems rather than a set of traditions — and eventually at which of those problems a machine should be allowed near.
I'm not a traditional engineer.
Everything on this site was built through AI-assisted development, with me running the privileged commands myself. I did not learn to write production code and I'm not going to claim I did.
I lead with that distinction because I think the scarce skill here has moved. Writing the code is no longer the constraint. Knowing which processes should never be automated, and having the discipline to leave them alone when the technology obviously could handle them — that's the constraint. That's what running a business with real customers and real employees actually teaches you.
Two reasons, both self-interested and worth stating plainly.
I'm looking for an operating role, and a documented build with published failures is a better argument than a résumé bullet.
And I think most writing about business automation is unfalsifiable. Confident numbers, no methodology, no failures, no mention of what wasn't measured. I'd rather publish the caveats and be trusted on the parts that hold up.
Everything here follows one rule: if a claim isn't supported by my own systems, it doesn't go in.
How I verify claims before publishing →
I'm available for operating roles and I take a small number of consulting conversations with service-business owners.