Personal

What did you do today?

How did you feel about today?

Evening Check-In

Meetings Recap

Paige (Toolbox9): Had my second meeting with her. We ended up talking, honestly a lot, about just people stuff within the organization. Talked a little bit about things that she enjoys doing, which is account management and really partnering up with clients. We talked a lot about how a logical business development growth strategy is through referrals and partnerships, and that's how she's trying to grow her side of the business as well too.

We didn't really dive into any business owner-type conversations, and I realized now that she never was the business owner of Toolbox9, so I tried to get her to dive deeper into a couple of different areas, and she didn't really take the bait. I did talk to her about some personal stuff. She's a big Hi-rocks fan, so she's done a couple of those complex competitions. She got married last year, I think sometime around October of 25, and bought a house in Buckhead. She definitely wants to be kept in the loop with things, which she's already on the Atlanta marketing event stuff, but all of these notes should get tossed into a note within Dex as well.

Daniel Sagona: We met over at Ponce City Market so that he could go over his website with me. He basically wanted to show me his website and for me to give him a rundown of how he should be thinking about the various different structures and different parts and pieces of it. We chatted about that for about an hour. He was extraordinarily appreciative, and he also mentioned that he actually has access to the space in Atlanta that is willing to let him host events there for free. Daniel, given that he runs a video company, would also be shooting video at said events.

The thing is, Daniel doesn't want to host all of the events himself. He asked me if I would be willing to collaborate on an event at this space. The answer is yes, but I have no idea what that needs to look like.

Deliverables

Wits End — Celebrate service site: Actually made good progress on the Celebrate service website for Wits End. I think I got it to about 80% done. I need to basically just test the email send a couple more times, but I think I have pretty much everything locked and loaded for that. That's fantastic!

Classic City website: I also played around some more with the Classic City website and added some more fun elements to it. None of them are live quite yet. They're all on staging at the moment, but I'm trying to figure out ways to get people to click over to the site and just have some fun with it and actually explore it and be memorable in that way. It's been a fun little project. I'm trying to not get distracted by it, because there's client work that I need to get done. It's been a challenge because I really wanted to sink a lot of my time into that too.

Jaipur Rugs: This was a meeting that Andrew and I should have had this past week or today, actually, but Nitesh had to cancel it last minute, so I'm trying to get this rescheduled. I'm really excited about this project because it's probably not going to be the hugest one, but it has the potential to be larger over time because this is going to be a relatively new line of business for this company.

State Election Board (through inserv360): We got the signed scope of work for this today, which is absolutely wonderful. That will then get kick-started on Friday afternoon.

TexBuilt: I swapped some emails today with Rebecca because she didn't realize there was a contract that needed to be signed. She has some interesting clauses she wanted to add in terms of rounds of revisions and things along those lines. I think I was able to accommodate them and also not accommodate them at the same time. She wanted multiple rounds of revisions in this extraordinarily tight timeline. I was assuming she wanted multiple rounds of revisions for each segment of the project. What I told her was that, in order to make that work, we basically need to do two rounds of revisions over the whole project:

1. The first would be based on the wireframes.
2. The second would be based on when the content got loaded in.

She seemed to approve that, so that's good. Now I just basically have to take this style guide thing that I've been working on and actually implement the freaking thing now.

Chris DuBois' Article: Chris DuBois is in the process of writing up a lot of stuff for me and helping me create a lot of initial assets. One of the things he sent over a couple of days ago was a Google Doc that was basically this eight-page guide. You have access to all this; you've seen it before. I actually went ahead and created the landing page version of this. I'm actually pretty happy with it. You actually had some ideas for some different things that we could do with it, some expansion opportunity and stuff like that. We'll dive into those later, but I'm glad that I got something of Chris's finished within 48 hours of him sending it over.

New Clients / Prospects

None new. But I need to go ahead and finish the Loran project. The US Pool Defense one has been kind of sitting on my heels for whatever reason; I just can't get moving on it. I need to get that actually into motion for tomorrow. That'd be great. I probably need to spend about 45 minutes on it, and that should be able to get it wrapped up. There's a laundry list of marker tasks that he submitted that I should take a look at and then start triaging.

Asking: could we work together inside the pool-defence WordPress repo, pull the Asana task list, and work through them one by one within the repo?

• Asana board: https://app.asana.com/1/60673121916319/project/1214003870458405/list/1214003854990363
• Repo: ~/Local Sites/pool-defence ✓ confirmed exists

Reflections

What worked today worth repeating: Today was a good day down at Ponce City Market. I actually kind of liked only having two meetings. I liked having kind of the middle time to myself where I wasn't always being 100% extroverted and social. I know that's not the best use of my time, but at the end of the day it was a very enjoyable way to spend it. I was able to actually focus on that Whitson Celebrate Service project for longer than I expected because I had that dedicated time there. The idea of getting out of the house and actually working on deliverable stuff might not be the worst idea in the world. If I'm going to be doing some more deliverable things, maybe I should be blocking off a day or so a week and actually going somewhere and getting it done, especially now that I have a computer that can do all the things I needed to do.

What surprised you — good or bad: This is kind of in the same vein as the Local Jungle work that I'm doing, but I very much enjoyed consulting with Daniel today about his website. I realize there's not money in just walking people through how to think about their website better, but it is something that I very much enjoy and I wish I could use. I wish I could create some way that I could help people like this without it feeling like a basic audit. The idea of being able to say, "I will actually sit down and help you with your site and make you think about it better and not have to redesign everything." I will do all of that, but when you talk about that kind of thing on a website and in LinkedIn posts and stuff like that, it reads as "free audit sales call", and that's not my point. If there was a way that I could do more stuff like that, I feel like that would be a great use of time overall, because I was able to help him in 30 minutes and give him a heck of a lot of clarity with a site and really unblock him.

Anything bugging you or any spark worth chasing: I'm really just still thinking about the overall structure of the business, the actual people inside of it, and how AI is increasing more and more by the day. I really feel like a lot of the work that we do now can basically be done by three total people. I'm debating whether I actually want to go full-bore into actual execution work and just say that, two out of the three days of the week, I'm just going to be in no-meetings mode and just doing execution. Does that actually make sense? I finished that Celebrate Service project in two hours today and am going to make like $4,700. Now, obviously it's not done, but legitimately the bulk of it is. This TexBuilt site — my goal is to take the style guide that we've created and whip up ten different page layouts using the elements within that style guide and be prepped for a meeting next week. That's not going to take me that much time anymore. Is there a path that I actually do sit in an execution seat and be okay with that and basically mentally wrap my mind around that, or do I need to figure out how to delegate that stuff? I don't know.

Open Loops

1. TexBuilt contract to Rebecca — needs to go tomorrow, ~15 min.
2. TexBuilt task buildout in Motion:

• Finish editing the Style Guide / add any additional blocks I want (~1 hr).
• Before WP Engine: work with Claude to take the Style Guide blocks and build out dummy pages with sample content, so the staging upload has real content in it.
• Spin up WP Engine staging site (~15 min) — after dummy pages are done.
• Schedule a meeting with Rebecca for next week to review the wireframes.

Podcast Queue

• The execution-seat dilemma: What if the owner of a 3-person agency just... did the work two days a week? "I finished that Celebrate Service project in two hours today and am going to make like $4,700. My goal is to whip up ten different page layouts [for TexBuilt]. That's not going to take me that much time anymore. Is there a path that I actually do sit in an execution seat and be okay with that, or do I need to figure out how to delegate that stuff?" — Agency-owner tension about AI collapsing the leverage math. Not a hypothetical; it's what he's actually debating tonight.
• The anti-audit consult: "There's not money in just walking people through how to think about their website better, but it is something that I very much enjoy... when you talk about that kind of thing on a website and in LinkedIn posts, it reads as 'free audit sales call,' and that's not my point." — The tension between a high-value, hard-to-productize service and the watered-down marketing language available for it.