I am the whole company.
That is the point. You will not be handed to an account manager, and the person who sat with your dispatcher is the person who writes the code.
How I ended up doing this
I have written software my whole career. In 2018 I was laid off from a corporate job and went out on my own expecting to do contract development. What I found instead was that the companies who needed me most had a problem that wasn't really a software problem. They had grown, the way they worked hadn't, and no one inside could stand far enough back to see it.
The work those companies needed was only partly code. The harder part was sitting in a room with an owner who knows the business cold and doesn't speak technology, sitting an hour later with the person who has done the same frustrating task every day for fifteen years, and getting both of those conversations to point at the same problem.
That turned out to be the thing I am actually good at. The building is the easy part now.
What I know, and what I don't
I'm not going to pretend I came up through your industry. I didn't.
I have never worked an oilfield job or practiced civil engineering. I had never heard of a crawler carrier until I met the company that sells them, and I knew nothing about emergency hazmat response until I started working with the company that does it. In both cases I went, listened, learned the work, found where it hurt, and built around that.
What I do bring is a mechanical head. My dad did carpentry, and I've done my own plumbing, electrical, demo and construction work because I'm handy and comfortable with tools. That matters less as expertise than as disposition. I'm not uneasy in a shop, I don't need the work explained twice, and I have enough respect for skilled trades to assume the person doing a job knows more about it than I do. They do. That is why I ask.
Good systems disappear. People just notice the job got easier.
No one should have to think about the software. The employees should notice that the annoying part of their day is gone. The owner should notice fewer mistakes, faster billing, and better numbers. If either group is thinking about the software, something went wrong.
Also true
I run this from Tyler, Texas, and work with companies wherever they are. My wife Andréa is a graphic and web designer and we run DayLight Creative Technologies together. We built the business around the life we wanted rather than the other way around, which is why I can give a client a same-day answer at eight at night and why I won't pad an invoice with a drive I didn't need to make.
We also build and ship our own products, which keeps the technical side sharp and means I'm not recommending things I have never had to live with.
