People ask me this at parties. Or at least, they ask the polite version, which is "how did you get into consulting?" The real question, the one they're too nice to say out loud, is probably closer to "why would anyone start a consulting business in a beach town?"
Fair question. Here's the honest answer.
The short version
I'd been working in operations for years. Bigger companies, mostly. The kind where you fix a process and it affects hundreds of people and looks great on a slide deck but you never actually see the human result. The work was fine. The pay was good. And I was spending my evenings looking at real estate in Santa Cruz and my weekends driving over the hill to surf.
At some point, the math stopped making sense. Not the financial math. The life math. I was optimizing operations for companies whose missions I didn't particularly care about, in places I didn't want to live, so that I could afford brief visits to the place I actually wanted to be.
So I moved here and started doing the same work for smaller businesses. That's the whole story.
The longer version
It wasn't that clean, obviously. I didn't quit on a Friday and start consulting on a Monday. There was a period of figuring things out that involved more anxiety than I'd like to admit and a lot of long walks on West Cliff Drive that were less meditative and more "what have I done."
The first year was rough in the way that everyone warns you about but you don't really believe until you're in it. Getting clients when nobody knows you. Pricing your work when you have no local track record. Explaining what "operations consulting" even means to someone who runs a surf shop or a restaurant.
That last part was the real education. I came from a world where "operations" was a department. In a small business, operations is just everything. It's how you open in the morning, how you order supplies, how you handle a customer complaint, how you close the books at the end of the month. Nobody calls it operations. They just call it running the business.
I had to learn to speak a different language. Not dumber. Different. More direct. More connected to what actually happens on a Tuesday afternoon when someone calls in sick and the delivery is late and there's a line out the door.
Why small businesses
I get more satisfaction from helping a 12-person company get their Fridays back than I ever got from restructuring a department of 200.
That sounds like something you'd put on a website, and I realize it is on a website right now, but it's also true. When you work with a small business and something clicks, you see it happen. The owner's shoulders drop. They stop checking email at 10 PM. They take a weekend off for the first time in three months. Their partner tells you, unprompted, that things are better at home.
That doesn't happen in big companies. Or if it does, it's so diluted across hundreds of people that you never feel it.
Small businesses are also where the problems are most fixable. Not easy, fixable. The gap between "how things work now" and "how things could work" is usually not that big. It's a handful of changes, not a corporate overhaul. But the impact of closing that gap is enormous because margins are tight and time is scarce and every hour matters.
Why Santa Cruz
I could do this work from anywhere. Consulting is portable. I have clients outside of Santa Cruz, and video calls work fine for most of what I do.
But being here matters in ways that aren't immediately obvious.
First, I understand the context. When a restaurant owner on the Westside tells me their labor costs are killing them, I know what rents look like in the neighborhoods where their staff can actually afford to live. When a retail shop says February is brutal, I don't need a chart to understand why. I live in the same economy, deal with the same seasonality, navigate the same local quirks. That shared context makes the work better.
Second, this town has a high density of people who started businesses for the right reasons. They didn't start a company because they read a book about entrepreneurship. They started it because they wanted to make a living doing something they care about in a place they love. Those people are the best clients because they're motivated by something real, and they're willing to do the work to protect it.
Third, and this is the selfish reason, I like my life here. I surf before work a few mornings a week. I walk my dog at Wilder Ranch. I know my neighbors. My business gives me the life I moved here for, which is exactly what I try to help my clients build for themselves.
What ten years taught me
I've been doing this long enough now to have seen patterns. Businesses that thrive here share certain traits. They're realistic about their market. They plan for seasonality instead of being surprised by it. They invest in their people because they know how hard it is to hire in this town. They keep their operations tight because the margins don't leave room for waste.
The ones that struggle usually aren't struggling because of Santa Cruz. They're struggling because of internal friction that would follow them anywhere. The processes that don't work. The decisions that don't get made. The conversations that don't happen. The stuff that feels hard but is actually fixable.
I've also learned that I can't help everyone, and that the best work happens when someone's ready for it. Not desperate. Ready. There's a difference. Desperate people want you to save them. Ready people want a thought partner who'll tell them the truth and help them build something that works.
If you're curious about working together, the best first step is just a conversation. No pitch, no proposal. Just a chance to hear what's going on and see if I can be useful. Sometimes I can, sometimes I can't, and I'll tell you honestly either way.