When people ask how JustStart AI started, they are usually expecting a business story. There really is not one. There was no carefully mapped-out business plan or strategy session where Jennifer and I decided we should build another company. JustStart AI grew out of a friendship, a shared curiosity, and a lot of conversations about a technology that seemed to be changing by the hour. Jennifer was already thinking deeply about what AI and intelligence were going to mean for business, and I was trying to understand what any of it meant for a contractor who still had to answer phones, make payroll, run calls, lead people, and get through Monday morning.
At the time, it felt like the floodgates had opened. Contractors are constantly being sold to, and suddenly every time I opened Facebook there was another AI tool, another course, another automation, another agent, and another promise that this was the thing that was going to change my business. It became hard to know what to trust, what to buy, what deserved my time and energy, and what was simply capitalizing on everyone’s fear of being left behind. I would take screenshots of random tools or ideas I found and send them to Jennifer with some version of the same question: “Can I trust this?” I was not questioning something she had sent me. I was using her as a filter for all the noise coming at me from everywhere else.
Often, her answer was no. Sometimes she would tell me a tool was not safe. Sometimes she would tell me it was not ready, that there was a better option, or simply to run. Other times neither of us knew enough yet, so we would explore it together. That became one of my favorite parts of our relationship. I could be curious without feeling stupid, and Jennifer never made me feel like I should already know the answer. She would patiently explain what she knew, and then I could almost watch her brain start swirling around my question, looking for three other solutions neither of us had considered when the conversation started.
People sometimes assume Jennifer was the teacher and I was the student. That is too simple. She was absolutely further ahead than I was, but she was learning too. AI was moving too fast for anyone to have all the answers, and that was part of what made it exciting. We would take the same idea and apply it differently. Jennifer naturally pushed toward what was possible. I naturally pulled it back into the reality of a trades business and asked whether a CSR would use it, whether a technician would adopt it, whether it would actually create leverage, or whether it would just become one more thing my team had to manage. It became a symbiotic relationship. She stretched my thinking, and I helped ground the idea in the world I knew best.
Somewhere along the way, I became Jennifer’s translator to contractors. As she taught me more about AI, intelligence, and this entirely new thinking game, I started connecting those ideas to dispatch, sales, customer experience, hiring, service, leadership, and all the very real hardships of running a trades company. I was not translating because I had become the technical expert. I was translating because I understood the person on the other side of the conversation. I am the voice of the contractor because I am the contractor. I knew what it felt like to understand the trade but not the technology, to be intrigued by what was possible and still wonder how in the world I was supposed to use any of it in a real business.
That dynamic became obvious when we started sharing stages and podcasts. Jennifer teaches and I question, not because I disagree, but because I know exactly what the audience is thinking. I ask the question sitting in my own head, which is usually the same question someone in the audience is afraid to ask out loud. What does that actually mean? How would I use it? How does this help me run a better business? We do not rehearse that rhythm because it is the same rhythm we have always had in private. Jennifer expands what’s possible. I help people see themselves in what’s possible. She introduces the future, and I help bridge the gap between that future and Monday morning. I am the voice of the contractor because I am the contractor.
Jennifer ultimately decided that we were going to build something around AI before I fully understood what she already had in her head. If the idea had been left to me, it probably would have remained an idea in passing. We would have had some great conversations, maybe recorded a few podcasts, and then I would have gone right back to running AirWorks and chasing the next thing. Jennifer does something I deeply admire: she makes ideas materialize. She saw a real community before I did, and she stayed committed to it. Jennifer and her team carried the weight of building the assets, producing the content, creating the systems, and keeping the project moving. For a long time, my job was much simpler. I just had to show up.
Showing up mattered, though, because I brought a perspective Jennifer could not manufacture. I’m the contractor. I’m the sandbox. I brought the questions of someone learning in real time while still responsible for a real operating company. I pressure-tested ideas inside AirWorks, pushed back when something did not make sense to me, and shared what I was learning as honestly as I could. Jennifer is systematic. I’m instinctive. We both move fast, sometimes with good intentions traveling at an unreasonable speed, and part of what makes the partnership work is that neither of us can simply run over the other. Jennifer built the platform, and I helped build the bridge. We both opened doors for each other, brought each other into rooms we might not have entered on our own, and kept inviting other people to our tables. Neither of us had to shrink for the partnership to work. We just had to keep making room.
The name itself came in the least strategic way possible. I was sitting in the bleachers at my daughter’s softball game, searching GoDaddy between innings and trying to find a name that was actually available. Just Start AI was available, and the more I sat with it, the more perfect it felt. We did not need people to master AI. We needed them to start somewhere. Start with one question, one tool, one workflow, one problem you are already trying to solve. Waiting until you feel completely ready is a great way to make sure you never begin.
We started simply, with a Facebook page. As people joined the conversation, we realized they wanted more than content. They wanted a place to talk, ask questions, share what they were building, and figure things out with other people who were also learning. We moved into a Circle community, and today JustStartAI.io has become the front door to what we have built. The website holds tools, prompts, frameworks, and resources Jennifer has created and shared in the hope of helping contractors level up and create more leverage in their businesses. The website matters, but the community is still the heart of it because conversation is where people stop feeling like they are the only ones who do not have this figured out yet.
That was important to both of us from the beginning. Contractors are sold to all day long. We did not want JustStart AI to become another place where someone had to wonder what the pitch was going to be at the end. We wanted people to be able to ask honest questions without feeling embarrassed, experiment without feeling judged, and learn without feeling sold to. Somewhere in the middle of all those conversations, I looked at Jennifer and said, “We’re building the ark.” That was my revelation and, in a lot of ways, my mission for what this could become. The wave of AI was already here. I wanted as many people as possible who wanted to thrive in the next era to have a place where they could get on board, learn, and decide for themselves what to do with the information. We were not holding back what we were learning. We were trying to make sure people who wanted to ride the wave had a way onto it.
We were both all in. Then we got distracted, and then we came back together. That might be the most honest way to describe this first year. JustStart was never the only thing either of us was carrying, and there were stretches when our attention pulled in different directions. But we kept coming back to it, and to each other, because the reason we built it had not gone away. If anything, the need was getting bigger.
We chose to learn out loud. We did not hold everything back until we were certain or polished or ready to declare ourselves experts. We worked things out in real time, sometimes live, shared what we knew, admitted what we did not, and kept learning. I did not think many people would tune in at first. I certainly did not imagine people would eventually walk up to us at events and tell us they were “fan-girling.” That still makes both Jennifer and me uncomfortable, but it also makes me incredibly proud. They are not responding to celebrity. They are telling us that something we shared became part of their journey.
I am normally moving too fast to spend much time reflecting on that. Writing this has made me stop long enough to realize how meaningful it is. JustStart AI helped a lot of people feel comfortable enough to start somewhere when they had no clue where to begin. Our willingness to be humble and learn in public gave other people permission to try things too. Sometimes you just have to know about the thing to be able to use the thing. You cannot build with a tool you have never been introduced to, and you cannot imagine a possibility you do not know exists. Nobody should be starting from zero. We should all be picking up wherever the last person left off. Share it forward. Learn out loud. We were planting seeds. Where people chose to go with the information was always up to them.
One of the most incredible parts has been watching what people did with those seeds. Contractors who were initially trying to understand what AI even was started building dashboards, automations, agents, and solutions for their own businesses. I still underestimate their ability to become true AI builders. I am not that technical, and I do not pretend to be. I am a visionary. I can see ideas, patterns, possibilities, and the leverage that comes from applying intelligence to a problem. I am blown away by the contractors who took that exposure and turned themselves into actual builders using AI. Jennifer and I did not build those solutions for them. They did. We just helped plant some of the seeds.
It is also hard to believe all of this has happened in about a year. In that short amount of time, JustStart AI has opened doors I never expected. Companies now see me as an AI advocate, and I have been given speaking opportunities that allow me to talk about technology while focusing even more on human development. The more I learn about AI, the more convinced I become that the human side matters. I do not want to build companies where technology wins and people lose. I want to use technology to create leverage so people can think better, lead better, create more, and spend more time doing the work that actually requires a human.
That is why the label “AI advocate” has never felt complete to me. I am an advocate for leverage. An advocate for human development. An advocate for options and possibilities. AI happens to be one of the greatest leverage tools we have ever been given because it lets us apply intelligence and efficiency in ways that create exponential results. The businesses that embrace it thoughtfully are going to have an advantage, and the ones that refuse to engage with it will eventually find themselves competing against companies that learned to do more, learn faster, and improve continuously. Starting early matters because every experiment compounds. You do not just gain technology. You gain judgment.
The things we are building now still blow my mind, and I know we are only getting started. That is probably the most fitting part of the whole story. Jennifer and I did not build JustStart AI because we had mastered artificial intelligence. We built it because we were curious enough to keep asking questions, generous enough to share what we were learning, and willing to invite other people into the process before any of us felt completely ready. The point was never to know everything. The point was to start. AI is the cape. The human is the hero. It’s up to them how they wear it.
