November 2025
I'm one person. Not a small team, not "a network of partners," not a founder with a back office somewhere. When you hire me, the person who designs your site, writes the code, locks down the security, and watches your rankings is the same person who picks up when you email. That's not a limitation I'm apologizing for. It's a decision I made on purpose, and after 25 years of doing this, I'd make it again tomorrow.
Let me explain what that actually means for you, because I think the reason matters more than the fact.
You'll never play telephone with an account manager
Here's the thing about most agencies: the person you meet in the sales pitch is almost never the person who builds your site. You get handed off. There's an account manager who relays your wishes to a designer, who relays questions back through the account manager, who maybe gets it right by the third try. Every layer is a chance for your actual point to get watered down or lost.
I've sat on the other side of that game and it drove me up the wall. So I cut it out entirely.
When you tell me your busy season is October and you need the new service page live before then, I'm the one who heard it, and I'm the one who builds it. Nothing gets translated. Nothing gets dropped in a handoff. If something's wrong, there's exactly one person to hold accountable, and it's me. I think that's how it should be. You deserve to talk to the person whose hands are on your business, not someone whose job is to manage the conversation.
That accountability cuts both ways, and I'm fine with that. I own my mistakes. There's nobody to point at.
Craft doesn't scale — so I didn't try to scale it
You can grow a web shop one of two ways. You can hire bodies, build a sales team, rent a bigger office, and start chasing enough clients to feed all of it. Or you can stay small and put the money and attention into the work itself.
I picked the second one, and I'll be honest about why: the moment you add all those people, somebody has to pay for them. That's you. A big chunk of an agency invoice isn't your website — it's the overhead, the meetings, the layers. I'd rather you pay for the thing you actually wanted.
I don't use WordPress or off-the-shelf templates, either. I hand-code every site on tools I've used daily for about 15 years. The internet is drowning in sites that look like a hundred others because someone bought the same theme — what I call the sea of sameness. It's gotten worse now that anyone can paste AI output into a template and call it a website. A real person making real decisions about your design and build is the opposite of that, and it's exactly what I protect by staying small. You can see what that looks like in my portfolio.
Modern tools let one expert do what used to take a crowd
Here's the part that surprises people. "How do you run hundreds of sites by yourself?" The honest answer is that the tools got dramatically better, and I built mine to take full advantage.
Years ago I built my own content system — I call it Gravity Fox — that lives separately from the sites it feeds. Think of it like one master control room wired into every storefront, instead of me walking to each store with a toolbox. That one piece of engineering means I can keep every client on the latest, fastest technology without re-doing each site by hand.
I use AI the same way — carefully, as a tool under a heavy hand, never as a slop machine that writes your site for you. A few examples of what that buys you, almost always at no extra charge:
- An AI classifier screens your contact form so spam doesn't bury the real leads.
- When a major update to my core tools drops, an AI-driven process I built upgrades my entire fleet of sites in sync — yours included — so you're never the one stuck on old, slow software.
- My security setup welcomes the legitimate AI search crawlers (the ones behind tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity) so your business stays findable when people ask an AI for a recommendation, while it blocks the impostors pretending to be them. That's the heart of my AI optimization work.
This is the real reason a solo operator can credibly do this now. The leverage that used to require a department of specialists is available to one person who knows how to wield it. So when you see a big firm's price tag, a lot of it is paying for a structure that the work no longer strictly requires.
Small doesn't mean fragile
I want to be clear, because "one person" can sound risky. Every site I run sits behind one centrally-managed security edge — a web application firewall, bot defense, rate-limited forms, encryption end to end, certificates that renew themselves. Bank-level, by choice. I do that not because it earns me more (it doesn't), but because it's the right way to handle something you depend on.
And you're never trapped with me. Hosting is $150 a year, flat. You own your data and can take a full export and walk anytime. I never control your domain — that always stays in your name. No contracts that hold you hostage. If staying with me has to be a choice you keep making, then I have to keep earning it. That keeps me honest.
One more thing. The best work I do happens when a client treats this like working with an architect: I bring the engineering and the craft, you bring the inside knowledge of your business that I could never have. When both of those show up, the results are genuinely better. I can't fake knowing your customers — but I can build something extraordinary around what you tell me.
That's why I'm one person. Not because I couldn't build a bigger thing, but because the smaller thing serves you better. If that sounds like the kind of relationship you want, you can read more about how I work or just send me a note — you'll be talking to me, which is rather the whole point.