What if Heaven is just around the corner?
Not somewhere far off and far ahead, but near at hand, pressing in against the ordinary world and waiting on the other side of something we walk past every day. Heaven and earth are meant to meet, I think, and ordinary faithful work is part of how they are drawn together. Not the work of building the next Uber, but the slower, sturdier work of building something that lasts: a sustainable business, an honest living, a thing that will still be standing in thirty years. That is the work I give myself to, in faith that one day the veil will tear and the deeper magic will be revealed.
What I believe about building things
Stay where you are. The interesting work is in the places everyone else left. Centreville isn’t a constraint, it’s a position.
Build durable, not viral. A small business that lasts thirty years is worth more than a startup that lasts three. Most of what’s celebrated online is the second thing pretending to be the first.
Ship the work, don’t just advise on it. Strategy without execution is a deck nobody reads. The companies I run all do both, on purpose.
Small over big, almost always. Small businesses, independent infrastructure, the open web, local economies. The consolidation isn’t inevitable, it’s just convenient for the people doing the consolidating.
That’s the short version. The longer version is here if you want it.
What I’m working on now
Right now I’m deep in SEO, GEO, and LLM optimization, learning how to help good businesses get found by the people who actually need them. Not by flooding the internet with ads or gaming the algorithm, but by saying true things clearly and keeping the promises the listing makes. Most of what I’m writing this year traces back to that question: how does honest work get discovered in a world where the search layer is being rewritten?
Companies
- Centreville Tech — A fractional CMO and a delivery team for B2B companies. We run the marketing function, build the website and app, and ship the campaigns. One engagement, not three vendors.
- The Edge Mile — Private networks, LTE and 5G consulting, and Nokia hardware for people building the next layer of independent connectivity.
- Alabama Lightwave — Internet, circuits, managed IT, and DIA for businesses the big carriers don’t serve well.
What I maintain
- Rapid5GS — A one-command toolkit for deploying production Open5GS mobile core networks. It exists because setting up an EPC shouldn’t require a PhD or a six-figure software license.
- Detour — A free WordPress plugin that catches 404s and routes lost visitors somewhere useful. We forked it from an older plugin that had drifted into bundling ad code and backlink injection in customer emails, tore that out, and put it back under the same GPL license that let us start. No telemetry. No upsells. No Pro tier.
- TiDev, Inc. — I chair the 501(c)(3) foundation that stewards the Titanium open source mobile framework, from right here in Bibb County.
What I write and speak about
Rural broadband. AI search and what it’s doing to small businesses. The open web. Theology, sometimes. What it takes to build durable things from a small town. I’m available for podcasts, panels, and the occasional in-person talk.
You can follow along by RSS or by email. If you got here from one of my essays, welcome. If you got here looking to hire me, click the company above that fits the work.