What I'm working through, most weekdays.

Here's a test for whether your website has an owner: how long would it take to fix a typo on it today?

If the honest answer is "I'd have to find who has the login, then wait on someone," your site is between owners. It probably has been for a while.

That gap costs more than it looks like. The small fixes that never ship are the ones customers notice. The wrong price. The dead contact form. The page about a service you stopped offering last year. None of it needs a rebuild. It needs a person whose job is the site, on a rhythm, so a fix takes days instead of a committee.

That's a service I run now. You keep the site you have, wherever it lives, and I own the upkeep -- requests by voice note if that's easiest, fixes shipped within days, a site that stays true to the business as it changes.

If the typo test stung a little, details are in the comments.

When most small teams launch a campaign, the first week disappears into asset-making: landing page copy, ad variations, building a gated resource, tagline testing.

The campaign hasn't started, and the week's gone.

Most of that week is rewriting things you've already said. The offer, the positioning, the proof, the way you describe the problem -- if that lives on your site in a form tools can read, the assets come off it fast.

Landing pages that match the campaign. Ad angles to test. A resource built from what's already there.

The campaign starts from a foundation instead of a blank page.

If a launch always seems to take weeks of setup before anything ships, the setup is usually the tell. The pieces you keep rebuilding are the ones worth building into the foundation once and for all.

Every month for the first year, Skyler builds a ring of flowers around each of our girls and takes their picture.

This one's the twins at eleven months. The flowers come from a neighbor of ours who grows them in her backyard and turns it into these arrangements -- she runs a little business doing it. Sky lays the whole circle out by hand, then we get maybe thirty seconds before someone starts grabbing at a rose.

She's done this for all four of the girls. Parker and Dylan get in on it now too, half helping, half supervising.

It's a lot of work, honestly. But it's all worth it. Taking a beat to actually capture a moment, instead of letting the month blur past, turns a random Tuesday into something the girls will have forever.

Sky's eye and creativity are just a few more things that make her special. And I'm grateful I get to watch, help, and enjoy these little time-lapse photos of all my girls.

There are two ways people usually get a website, and both leave them stuck.

Road one is the website builder. You pay for a plan and a domain, and then it hands you the tools and a weekend of homework. Weeks later you've got a half-finished page you're a little embarrassed by, and the subscription's still billing.

Road two is the freelancer. Good build, real money -- and then they vanish. The site's live, but the first time something needs to change or breaks, you're on your own, and fixing it means starting the hunt over.

Each one fails exactly where the other wins. The builder never leaves but makes you do the work. The freelancer does the work but leaves.

The fix, from what I've seen, is one person doing both jobs. Build it well, then stay: watching it every week, fixing what breaks, changing what you ask them to change.

I've set up a service that works exactly that way. Details in the comments.

There's a gap I keep running into: people who've read everything about AI and set up almost none of it.

You use Claude in a browser tab and suspect you're using 5% of its actual capability. You've nodded along to "just put your site in GitHub." You've got three tasks a week that are obviously automatable, and they're still done by hand.

You've done the reading. The setup is still waiting.

What closes the gap, from what I've seen, is one day where the thing gets set up and working with your hands on the keyboard. Install the tools, connect them to your real work, ship one real change, build one agent on a task you actually have. Small, concrete, done by dinner.

The unlock is doing it once. After you've shipped one change yourself, you believe you can do it again. Everything after that is repetition.

I run these as full working days now, at your place, on your machine. Details in the comments.

Referral businesses hide their website problems better than anyone.

Work keeps arriving through relationships and reputation, so the quiet site reads as harmless. And the costs stay invisible by design. No report shows the strangers who checked the site and moved on. Nobody mentions the stale services page they read on the way to replying to your intro.

That second one is the part worth sitting with. Even the warm intro looks you up before writing back. The best pipeline you have still crosses the surface you stopped maintaining.

Worth an honest check this week: where did your last ten clients actually come from? If every answer is a referral, your site has been grading itself on an absence of complaints -- and absence of complaints is the one grade a quiet page always gets.

Wrote up where these leaks usually hide, and five checks you can run yourself to find yours. Link's in the comments.

A tea ceremony sounds like the touristy thing you do in Japan. Went in half expecting that.

What happened instead surprised me. A guide invited us into his home to follow his practice, a ritual older than the country I come from, and somewhere in the middle of it a calm settled over the whole room. I'm usually a little cynical about that stuff. It got me anyway.

Being served like that was its own kind of beautiful. Someone with decades in a practice, walking the curious through it step by step, sharing a tradition because sharing it is the point.

Mostly, though, it was the feeling of being led for a change. Letting somebody else set the pace. Following without needing to figure anything out, and finding how much quiet there is in that.

Still think about that room.

Your website might be describing a company that no longer exists.

Not through neglect. Through growth. The offers sharpened, the process matured, your best clients changed. The site still tells the 2022 version of the story, because keeping it caught up was never anybody's job.

That used to cost slowly. Now it costs twice. Prospects land and bounce off stale language. And when someone asks an AI about you instead, it answers from those same outdated pages -- or it guesses.

The fix starts smaller than a rebuild: find out what the site actually says. Not what you meant it to say. Have someone walk it page by page, reading it the way a buyer does and the way a machine does, and show you where the story drifted from the business.

The gaps usually cluster in a few fixable places. Stale offers on the homepage. A process page from two pivots ago. Answers a machine needs that live nowhere. An afternoon of fixes, once you can see them.

I do these walkthroughs for founder-led businesses. Details in the comments.

Spent years watching businesses spend real money on a website and get back something that looks great but does little else for them.

The problem isn't the design or the UI/UX. It's that nothing solid was built underneath, so every time they need a landing page or a campaign or a month of social, they're starting with a blank page.

A new website should be the outcome, not the goal. The goal is to unpack your messaging, brand, offers, etc., and build a foundation your business can run on.

Get that right and the posts, the pages, the ads all pull from one source and sound like you.

So, before you spend a dollar on a rebuild, here are the questions to ask whoever builds or runs your site. The answers tell you whether you're buying a foundation for your business or just a passing snapshot of how it stands today.

Early in my 20s, I spent a month living in a frat house in Boulder with fellow social entrepreneurs from all over the world.

The program was called the Unreasonable Institute.

This was the height of the social entrepreneurship wave, and the premise was simple: use a business to create better outcomes for the world.

Each entrepreneur spent the month working on our pitches, our messaging, and collectively figuring out how we tackled the world's biggest challenges together: climate, poverty, food supplies.

I was one of the few Americans in the cohort, sharing a Phi Kappa bunk room with a founder from Argentina and another from South Africa. It was amazing learning from them. Understanding their perceptions of the challenges at hand, the world, and life in general. Truly transformational.

The Institute has since transitioned. The movement wave crested and fell, the network scattered, and I've lost touch with more of those people than I'd like.

But the premise held up. I still think a business is one of the best tools there is for taking care of people. Most of what I do today runs on some version of that idea.

Most neglected websites got that way slowly.

The person who set it up moved on. The login lives in an old email thread. Updating anything means four messages and a favor, so updates stop happening, and somewhere along the way the site became nobody's job.

You can tell from the outside. The copy describes the business from a few years back. A price is wrong. There's a staff photo of somebody who left. The site still loads fine -- it stopped moving a while ago.

Here's the good news I keep giving people: this is one of the most fixable problems a business has. The site is usually most of the way there. What it needs is an owner. Someone on a rhythm, keeping it true as the business changes, shipping the small stuff before it piles up.

I've started doing exactly that -- taking over sites that have been sitting unattended, whether or not I built them, and running the upkeep so it stays current without anyone chasing logins.

If your site's been drifting, more in the first comment.

One of my clients added a COO and a CMO in the same quarter and made zero full-time hires to do it.

Both roles are "acting." I hold one of them. A colleague I've worked with for years holds the other. The company is a lean organization at a stage where the founder had been handling operations, sales, and marketing personally -- and the math for hiring two executives outright wasn't working.

The acting model works like this: senior operators step into the actual seat, with the title and the accountability, for the transition stage. We build the systems, run the functions, and document everything as we go. The goal is to work ourselves toward a decision point, where the company either grows into full-time versions of these roles or keeps the fractional setup because it fits.

What the founder gets back is focus. Relationships, advocacy, funding, the things only a founder can do.

The model has limits. It fits transitions and build phases better than steady-state operations. But if you're a founder carrying three jobs and the hiring math doesn't work yet, there's a middle path between doing it all yourself and a six-figure executive search.

Happy to talk through whether it fits your stage.

Long weekend coming up at the end of the week, and I know a handful of people who aren't really taking it.

Usually, it's the founders and operators where the business slows down when they step away, so the weekend turns into a lighter version of the week.

I've seen it before: phone nearby / a couple things they'll just knock out Sunday night so Tuesday isn't rough.

I've been that guy plenty. What I've come around to is that a long weekend you can't take shows you the spots where everything still runs through you.

If you've got a few days off ahead, here's a small thing worth trying: notice what you can't stop checking. That becomes your list to solve for.

Not for this weekend, obviously, go enjoy the weekend.

But when you're back, that's the starting point for what to hand off, write down, or build a system around.

Have a good one and be sure to take some of it.

I said a while back that it's surprising that some big companies' operations are held together with duct tape.

The part that surprised me most was that none of them started that way.

Every one of those operations was small and clean at some point. The tape shows up one piece at a time, and each piece makes sense on the day it goes on: a workaround here / a thing only John in sales knows / a process that lives in somebody's inbox.

It accumulates faster than anyone realizes.

So when I meet a small team where one person still holds the whole picture in their head, I don't see a company that's figured something out. I see the moment before the taping starts.

That's a good moment, though, because it's cheap to fix.

If your business still fits in your head, this could be your window. Get some of it onto paper while it's still fresh -- the handoffs, the decisions you make on instinct, the stuff you'd have to explain twice to a new hire.

When you finally get the operating logic out of your head, it sorts into three piles.

(This framing has been useful for a few of the founders I work with, so passing it along.)

Pile one becomes a system: the repeatable decisions with rules you can teach -- how work gets scoped, priced, staffed, reviewed. Most of what runs through you lands here, and this is where AI can carry real weight once the rules exist.

Pile two becomes someone's job: judgment that needs a person, but not you. Name the role, hand over the decision rights, and stop being the appeals court for it.

Pile three stays yours: a real pile, but a small one -- the bets, the relationships, the standard-setting. Naming it is what lets you release the rest without feeling like you're dropping the business.

Most founders assume everything is pile three but it's really a fraction of it.

Walked through the whole extraction here, including a 90-day version you can run yourself: shanegring.com/guides/everything-runs-through-you

Closing day, 2020. Out front with Skyler and Dylan, about to walk into a house we'd been dreaming about.

Been thinking about that morning lately, because so much of what I'd worked toward for years showed up at once. My marriage. Our first daughter. A home that felt like ours. And underneath it, the early version of the practice that's become my work now.

None of it happened fast. I'd been circling this kind of work for over a decade -- architecture school, a year with AmeriCorps building affordable homes, a company I started that got integrated into a non-profit, a long stretch in standards and sustainability.

But what I keep coming back to is that the day wasn't a finish line. It was a foundation for our future.

We now have four girls. I'm building them a replica playhouse of our mid-century home. Sky and I just celebrated our 8-year anniversary. The business is evolving every day with fun and exciting new clients, working on the frontlines of marketing ops.

So if you're in the patient stretch, the part before the things you're working toward have shown up, just keep going. As it turns out, there aren't many finish lines in life -- just more adventures ahead.

We recently shipped 120 pages of web content for a client. Here's the honest version of how.

The first few weeks looked unproductive from the outside. Almost nothing shipped. We were building the source material -- the voice, the positioning, the core explanations of the standard, all worked out once, carefully, in one place.

Then the pages came fast. Program pages, education content, resource libraries. With the source solid, AI could take a competent first pass against it at real volume, and review got quick because everything referenced the same foundation.

Two things I'd pass along from it.

Budget real time for the foundation, and let it look slow. The temptation is to start shipping day one, and every page you ship before the source exists is a page you'll redo.

And point your tools at your own source material. AI drafting from your foundation keeps sounding like you. Without one, you get the generic stuff everybody else can already make.

Volume was never the goal by itself. But reach has a volume component, and small teams can genuinely hit it now.

Many good websites are built by the same team that builds the product, using the same tools. It's a reasonable choice, but those tools are made for software.

And software gets delivered to a browser differently than a document does.

When someone visits a site built that way, the server sends a nearly empty file along with a bundle of instructions, and the visitor's browser assembles the real page on the spot.

It looks perfect on screen, but a machine reading the file as it was delivered gets the empty version, because it doesn't stick around for the assembly.

For the app itself, no harm done. Nobody's deciding whether to hire you based on a crawler reading the inside of your dashboard.

Your homepage, services, and pricing pages have a different job. Those exist so a stranger can learn what you do, and these days that stranger is often an AI tool answering on your behalf.

If your words aren't in the file, you're not in the answer.

Often, it's a small fix: leave the app an app, and move the pages that earn buyers into plain documents. Your content visible in the page source, where people and machines can both reach them.

Worth a read if you've got a good-looking site that isn't pulling its weight: shanegring.com/guides/move-content-into-html

Saw this pic in my camera roll yesterday. It's from when my twins, Scout and Murphy, were born.

I remember snagging the Polamalu jersey for the #Steelers season opener, because any true Pittsburgher can attest to this: black and gold is basically black-tie adjacent in terms dress code.

It was the first day with my twin girls. It was the first day of football season. It was the third delivery for Skyler, which she handled like a boss.

I remember thinking that when people find out you're having twins, they tell you all about how chaotic it's going to be. And it sure can be.

But they forget about the moments of quiet that come between the simultaneous diaper changes, the sleep training, the schedule juggling with their big sisters. How you come to appreciate both: the chaos and the calm.

The irony of this picture is that after months of waiting and preparing for our twins to arrive -- and the chaos to ensue -- I'm sitting in relative quiet, watching my two girls with the game in the background.

It's a moment I cherish and a nice reminder to take in those moments of calm.

Some of the most valuable IP I run into is sitting in a PDF nobody can find.

A client of mine had spent years developing a genuinely rigorous standard. The thinking was excellent, the documentation was thorough -- and all of it lived behind a download link. Prospects couldn't browse it. Search engines couldn't index it. AI tools couldn't read a word of it.

So the thing that made them credible was invisible at every moment that credibility mattered.

We brought the standard out into the open, published as a living digital resource instead of a locked file. Now it does jobs a PDF never could. Sales points to it. Marketing builds from it. Courses and certifications reference specific sections. And when someone asks an AI tool about the space, there's something real for it to find.

If your best thinking lives in a PDF, a deck, or a binder somewhere, it's probably working at a fraction of its value. Getting it out where people (and machines) can reach it is usually simpler than it sounds.

Try this. Open ChatGPT or Claude and ask the question your best client asked right before they found you.

That answer got assembled from what the engine could read about you and everybody you compete with.

If your site is hard for a machine to read, the engine works with less, and it either skips you or guesses. A growing share of buyers start here now -- a plain question, a plain answer, no list of links to scroll.

The part that catches people: the engines are already answering questions about your business. The only open question is what you've handed them to work with.

I put together a ten-minute check for what machines actually see when they read your site -- the five elements that decide it, each one you can test yourself.

shanegring.com/guides/can-ai-read-my-website

Some of my favorite clients are mission organizations. Standards bodies, certifiers, nonprofits with a real cause.

And a lot of them share the same discomfort: selling feels a little beneath the mission.

You can see it in how they're built. Deep expertise on the program side, real rigor in the standard, and then a sales and marketing function that's an afterthought, because the work is supposed to speak for itself.

Here's what I tell them: the mission is exactly why the commercial machine matters. A standard only does its work when people find it, adopt it, and build against it. That part runs on distribution, and distribution runs on the commercial stuff everyone's been avoiding.

From what I've seen, the orgs that make peace with that are the ones whose missions find their reach.

Four girls. Most days, I'm outnumbered before breakfast.

And lunch. And dinner. And, as evidenced by the pajamas here; bed-time as well.

People ask how my work fits around all this, and honestly, the answer is the opposite. My work is built around this.

A while back I made a decision about what I wanted my days to actually look like. The question was whether I could coach a client through something hard on a Tuesday morning and still make dance recitals, pool days, or after-school pick-ups.

And I'm grateful, because the kind of work I do now lets me answer yes more often than not.

Lately, I've been enjoying the morning drop-offs. Biking together to camp or art class, discussing the fun ahead with my older ones. Having time to grab a coffee. And then, getting some exercise before a day in front of the computer.

It isn't always tidy. Sometimes calls run late or clients reach out with an urgent request, but more often than not, I'm able to juggle it all.

Moving outside of the standard corporate setting was a trade I made, and it was a good one. I still get to do the work I love, and enough room around it to be there for the people who matter most.

Before you spend money on your website this year, get a read on it first.

I built a free scanner a while back that reads your site the way AI does. Drop in a URL, and within about 48 hours, you get a score and a short write-up about your site: can AI find and read you / could the site drive its own SEO and content / is it a foundation or a brochure.

The reason I bring it up again: it makes you a smarter buyer.

Web work is hard to shop for. Every proposal sounds reasonable when you can't see under your own hood. A read of where your site stands turns "trust me" conversations into specific ones. Hand it to your current developer, your marketing person, or whoever you're vetting, and ask what they'd do about the two or three things it flags.

The scan lives at shanegring.com/scan whenever you're ready.

Just wrapped a quarterly investor report for one of my clients, and the honest headline was: we didn't harvest much this quarter. We built the machine.

Ninety days ago, this certification organization had a mission, a rigorous standard, and a founder doing it all by hand. Since then: a five-channel content presence stood up from scratch, over a hundred pages of new web content shipped, email nurture automated, and a structured sales pipeline where there used to be memory and hustle.

What did all that convert? Honestly, it's early. The report says so plainly. This quarter was inputs. Next quarter is built to turn them into revenue.

I've watched some get discouraged at exactly this moment, because building leverage feels like spending without return. The machine is real, and the harvest lags it. Almost always does.

There's a season for building the system and a season for working it. Knowing which season you're in, and reporting it honestly, keeps everyone steady enough to reach the second one.

If you're mid-build right now and the numbers feel thin, that's often just the shape of it. Hold the line a bit longer.

A while back, I started working with an organization whose smallest offer was also their biggest ask.

They'd built something real: a respected standard, a certification pathway, a growing base that believed in the mission. But if you were a curious prospect, the only door in was the full certification. A big commitment / a long process / a serious price.

So plenty of interested people would show up, look at the one door, and leave.

One fix we proposed was to build smaller ways to say yes -- a lighter review, a workshop, a first step that cost less and taught them something either way. Each one designed to naturally lead to the next.

People finally had a way to start small and build trust before the big commitment.

If your pipeline feels quiet, take a look at your front door. If the first step is also the biggest one, a lot of good-fit people will stall right there.

Sometimes the move is a smaller offer sitting in front of the big one. Happy to think it through with you if that's useful.

Traveling halfway around the world with a two-year-old and a baby is as hard as it sounds.

Especially, if one is potty training.

Dylan was terrified of the fancy Japanese bidets, so early on the trip -- my wife, Skyler had to crisscross thru Tokyo's amazing subway system to locate her a less automated kid-sized seat.

But it's something I've / we've always wanted for them. They probably won't remember most of it, but the experience counts as much as the memory sometimes. For me, it does.

Here's what I mostly want to say, though. None of these trips happen without Skyler. She's the one who books it, plans it, packs it, and holds it together when it wobbles.

Been meaning to say it out loud instead of just thinking it: she's the reason our kids get to see the world. I get to carry Dyl, take photos, eat sushi, etc. But she's the real one who made these days exist.

There are plenty of software out there that promise to run your website for you now.

Pages that write themselves, SEO and AI search retuned every week, conversion handled, the whole stack in one tab.

But I'd start somewhere else first -- and it isn't the tool.

A website does all of that well for one reason: the business's operating logic is clearly captured.

What you offer, who it's for, how the work gets done, what's true right now. Get that onto the page and the rankings and the answers AI gives about you mostly sort themselves out, because there's something real to point at.

Skip it, and you've automated a brochure. Faster, prettier, and still describing a company that already moved on.

So I start from how your business runs. Build the site as the place it runs from, and let the tools do their jobs on top of that.

They're great once there's something true underneath for them to work with. That part still has to come first.

You hand something off, it comes back 80% right, you fix the last 20%, and the fixing takes about as long as doing it yourself would have.

After a few rounds of that, you take the work back.

I've watched a lot of founders run this loop, and I've run it myself. Here's what I think is actually happening:

What you handed off wasn't a task. It was a task plus a hundred small judgment calls -- which client gets the exception, when good enough is good enough, what you never do even when the client asks.

Your hire got the task, but the judgment stayed in your head. So they bring the judgment calls back to your desk, because your desk is the only place the answers live.

So how do you fix it?

The judgment has to come out of your head and into something other people can run from.

I wrote up how that extraction actually works -- why documentation fails, and what to capture instead of steps: shanegring.com/guides/everything-runs-through-you

The tricky thing about the signals that decide how machines read your site is that you can't always see them.

You look at your page and it looks right. But the browser can hide the things that matter.

Whether you've got one clear headline or three. Whether the sitemap still lists what you published last month. That's why these things fail on expensive, well-designed sites. The people checking are checking in the one place the problem is invisible.

So don't grade by eye. A few free checks take about five minutes. Right-click, View Source, and count the headline tags on your two most important pages. Load yoursite.com/sitemap.xml and confirm your newest page is in it.

Been meaning to make this stuff less mysterious, so I wrote up the checks anyone can run without a tool or a budget. Here if it's useful: shanegring.com/guides/seo-basics-that-cost-nothing

Every so often, you meet someone you just end up building with for years. @[Jennifer Easton](urn:li:person:hrql4O0xMo) is one of those people for me.

I've had the good fortune of working alongside her across a lot of rooms and a lot of projects, and she's the real deal.

Her resume only tells part of it: she was marketing hire number one at @[International WELL Building Institute (IWBI)](urn:li:organization:3825937), where she built the team from the ground up and grew a user list that included Uber, LinkedIn, and Mercedes-Benz.

Before that, seven-plus years marketing at the @[U.S. Green Building Council](urn:li:organization:25851), the folks behind LEED, plus agency work on brands like TD Bank and McDonald's.

In 2020, she took the leap and launched her own practice, pairing sharp, data-driven marketing with brands actually making people's lives better -- wellness / joy / a healthier planet.

And because one company isn't enough, she also runs Sway, her own sustainability start-up curating home goods made from healthy materials.

I'll say what the resume can't: Jennifer is generous, sharp, and genuinely fun to build things with. She's the kind of collaborator you keep finding reasons to work with again.

If your brand's doing something good in the world, she's someone worth knowing.

There's a stage of growth where the skills that got a company there stop being the skills it needs next. Nobody did anything wrong. The business just changed underneath everyone.

I see it most around the jump to enterprise. The team was built organically -- practitioners and true believers who grew into their roles, and it genuinely worked. Then the company crosses a threshold, and the job quietly becomes a different job. More technical, more systems, more proving it with data.

The instinct is usually to hire more people. From what I've seen lately, the better first move is a smaller dose of senior experience for the transition itself. Capture what's been working, document it, get the systems standing, and then decide what the team underneath should look like.

That order matters. Skip it, and every new hire inherits the same fog the last group was working in.

If your company's approaching one of those jumps, a question worth sitting with: has the job changed faster than the team's been given a chance to?

Most consulting ends with a deck. A smart one, usually -- good analysis, clear recommendations, a roadmap with phases.

Then everyone goes back to their day jobs, and the deck goes where decks go.

I've sat on both sides of that, and it's shaped how I work now. When I come into a business, my goal is to leave behind working things. The site rebuilt and live. The offer launched. The system wired up and running. If a recommendation matters, the fastest way to prove it is to build the first version of it.

Part of that is temperament. I'd rather do the thing than present the plan for it. But mostly it's practical: a live first version answers questions a deck can only guess at. You learn what customers actually do, what breaks, what the team can carry. Then the next decision is based on something real.

Good advisors are worth their weight, to be clear. Plenty of problems genuinely need thinking before building. But if you've got a shelf of smart plans and a business that looks about the same as last year, the gap is probably in the shipping.

That's a solvable one. Could be a hire, could be a working session, could be someone like me for a stretch.

Here's a test worth running on your own site in the next ten seconds.

Open it. Right-click, View Page Source, and search for a sentence from the middle of your page.

If it's there, your content ships where machines can read it. If the source is a short stub full of script tags and your words aren't in it, machines are getting an empty version of your site.

You'd be surprised. This happens more than you think.

A lot of modern builds hand the visitor's browser a nearly empty shell plus a pile of JavaScript, and the browser paints in the real page after. A person sees a finished site. A machine reading the document as delivered sees scaffolding.

It mattered less when Google was the only machine reading. Now, a lot of your buyers ask an AI tool first, and most of them just read the raw file and move on.

No painting-in.

Wrote up what's happening and the fixes ranked by effort. Link's here: shanegring.com/guides/move-content-into-html

Gym selfie. Sorry. 😬

I've been going a lot lately. Nothing crazy, just showing up and putting in the work most days.

Some of it's for my family, wanting to be around and able to keep up with them for a long time. Some of it's for me. But mostly it's the one hour where I can be alone with my thoughts and the only thing on the list is picking up something heavy and putting it down.

Funny thing I keep noticing, though. Somehow, over the past 6 months -- half the people I work with live in this world too.

The founders building sports training software. Coaches who spent a decade getting good at a thing and then had to figure out how to run a business around it. Fitness people, wellness people, athletics people.

Somehow that's where a lot of my work has landed, and I don't think it's an accident.

It's the same crowd, more or less. People who believe in showing up even when the work might feel boring. It's folks who trust that the reps add up even when the day-to-day doesn't feel like progress. That's a gym thing, but you'd be hard pressed to find a better description of building a business.

So I've got two communities, and they turn out to be one. The guys nodding at each other by the dumbbell rack at 6am, and the folks I'm on calls with who've built whole companies around helping people do exactly that.

Anyway -- back tomorrow. Might even hit legs.

One of the first things I look at inside a business is a simple comparison: where the time goes versus where the revenue actually comes from.

Almost every team can tell me what they're busy with. Fewer can tell me which of those busy things pay for the place. And when we lay the two side by side, there's almost always a gap -- hours pouring into work that's loosely tied to any dollar, while the offer funding everything gets whatever attention is left over.

Nobody plans it that way. Work accumulates. Commitments stack up.

The exercise is worth doing even roughly. List where the hours went last month, list where the money came from, and look at the mismatch. That gap is usually a better roadmap than any strategy doc, because it shows you what to protect, what to fix, and what to let go of.

It takes about an hour of honest accounting. In my experience, it changes the next quarter more than most planning sessions do.

When a website goes stale, everyone reaches for the same fixes. New design. Fresh copy. A rebuild. Usually that's not where the problem is.

A site goes stale because the way the business runs never made it out of people's heads and onto the page. The site caught one moment, the moment passed, and the real picture stayed with the handful of people who've always held it.

So you keep it current by hand. Which puts you right back at the bottleneck -- every update routed through the same few people who know how things work.

They're busy, so it slips, and the site drifts again.

The sites that stay current sit on top of a business that can run without those few people in the room. The knowledge is out where the team can reach it, so the site stays true without everything funneling through one head.

Which is why I've come to think of this as operations work as much as web work.

Fix the website and you've fixed a symptom. Get the operating logic out of people's heads, and the website becomes something much more than a static page.

Dylan doesn't know it yet, but we might've already committed her to @[Miami University](urn:li:organization:6729).

I graduated from Miami in '09 with an architecture degree, and honestly, the degree might be the least important thing I left with.

--

I left Miami with a brother in Bill James, who I met studying there and who introduced me to a life of service -- still my best friend. (Our families are gathering for pizza on Friday!)

I left with experience at the Oxford-area Habitat for Humanity chapter that pointed me toward AmeriCorps, and a few years building green affordable homes in Colorado.

...and even when I turned that into my first company, the school kept showing up. A few years into my career, Miami's Center for Entrepreneurship opened doors I couldn't have found on my own. (Despite never taking a business class!)

They brought me back to campus to discuss my work, and I was just a kid with a B Corp and a big idea, and they treated it like it was real before it was.

Then there's the rest of it: living in the Rounding Third house, season after season of broomball, more trips to Bagel and Deli than I'd ever admit to.

So when people ask if I really think it's the best college out there, I tell them that fall in Oxford is the closest we get to heaven.

That's my evidence, along with every moment I spent there.

A certification organization I worked with launched a new offering this year.

The usual playbook says polish the framework, build the marketing, then go find customers.

Instead, they ran it the other way. The credential is being piloted on two live client engagements right now, while it's still warm. Real deadlines, real stakeholders, real friction.

And the pilots are doing what planning rarely could.

Every place the framework gets awkward in practice, we find it now, while it's easy to fix. Language that confuses a client gets reworded. The evidence requirements that turn out to be unrealistic get reworked.

This means that the version that launches widely will have already survived contact with the real world.

There's a cost, sure. Piloting in the open is slower / messier than perfecting in private. But the version you perfect in private is usually perfect for a customer that doesn't exist.

I've found that if you're building something new, find one or two people who it'll immediately help and see if they will build it with you.

Discount it, support it heavily, whatever it takes. Their feedback is your roadmap to a better experience.

A lot of small businesses I know have people doing jobs they never trained for.

You started with an idea and something you're generally good at. Then the thing grows, and you (or your small team) have to also be the marketer, the designer, the person answering support emails, the sales team.

Here's what I've been telling folks: a lot of that load can come off you, and the key is your website (or more specifically, your Github), of all things.

When it's built to hold everything true about your business -- what you sell, how you talk, who it's for, what makes you you -- it stops being a page people look at and becomes something you work from. Your logic / your voice / your brand, in one place instead of scattered across your head and a dozen files.

Once that's there, AI tools have something real to work from. It can draft on-brand, because the brand is captured. It can answer a customer, because the real answers are on the surface.

𝗚𝗼𝗼𝗱 𝗱𝗮𝘁𝗮 𝗶𝗻, 𝗴𝗼𝗼𝗱 𝗱𝗮𝘁𝗮 𝗼𝘂𝘁.

Aim AI at an empty brochure and you get fast nonsense back. Give it a site that holds the real business, and it starts to feel like help.

And because people hear AI and brace for the worst: this has nothing to do with replacing anyone.

The move is to take what's in your head, your team's heads, and get it into one place, so everyone can do more with it than before.

The hub has to be built right. But once it's done, the thing runs 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 you instead of on top of you. And that's the whole idea.

https://shanegring.com/work-with-me

One of the stranger advantages I have as an outside operator: I don't know your company politics.

I don't know which project is somebody's baby. I don't know which decision got argued about for a year before I showed up. I walk in, see a thing that needs deciding, and help decide it.

Inside a company, a stalled project is rarely stalled on the work. It's stalled on history / on who'd have to admit what in order to move it. Those little decisions have weight for the people who've been living with them, and none for me.

I used to feel a bit sheepish about that.

Now I think of it as a point of value for some.

If something's been stuck for a year, ask an outsider to look at it. It doesn't have to be me. Sometimes it just takes a person who wasn't there for the argument.

Some of the cheapest wins in a business go undone because they're nobody's job.

There's a layer of a website that costs nothing but attention. One clear headline per page. Titles that say what the page is. Link text that describes where it goes instead of "click here." Alt text on the images that carry meaning. A sitemap that actually lists your newest pages.

None of it is advanced, and all of it decides how machines read everything you publish.

Here's why it rots. The site looked perfect the day it launched, and then the headings multiplied when someone edited a template, the sitemap froze when the person who set it up rolled off, and the alt text was "phase two." No error message ever fired. It quietly stopped being true.

The fix is an afternoon, page by page. What holds it up is ownership. This kind of work gets done when it's somebody's explicit job on a rhythm, and it slips when everyone assumes it got handled.

Wrote up the whole pass, the seven signals and how to check each one yourself. Link's here if a free afternoon sounds like a good trade:
shanegring.com/guides/seo-basics-that-cost-nothing

No rental cars left.

My brother Kyle and I flew out for a wedding in Colorado, went to grab our car, and there was nothing. Sold out.

We got on Turo and took the only thing available, which turned out to be this.

A Slingshot.

Then we drove it about four hours into the mountains.

No roof, no windshield, no real plan. Just the two of us, a borrowed go-kart of a vehicle, and a lot of wind. It was stupid and kind of uncomfortable and one of the better drives I've had in a while.

It goes to show that the things that go sideways might end up being the part you actually remember.

Here's a use for a website that most people haven't tried... making things with it.

Once a site is built (in a format AI can read), it stops being a place you send people and becomes a place you build from.

Landing pages for a campaign. Audience-focused variations to test. Social graphics / microsite / an interactive calculator/ branded sales decks.

They can all be built pulling from the same look, voice, and feel using your website as the singular source.

A website set up right can work differently. It's the raw material, and you shape the rest out of it in minutes.

That "could you build on it?" question is one of the things I check when I read a site. I made a tool to help do this.

Drop in your URL and it tells you where you stand across the three things that matter: https://shanegring.com/scan

I keep getting asked what the site scan tool I built tells you. So here's what comes back.

You drop in a URL and get a score out of 100, then a read on three things: whether AI can find and read your site, whether it can drive its own SEO and content, and whether it's something you could build on or just a brochure you keep patching. Each one scored, each one explained in plain English. Then the one or two moves that would matter most for you.

Ran it on a site the other day that came back a 52. "Getting there." And the way the score split out is the whole reason I built it this way.

The technical side was sharp -- clean structure, schema done right, even a couple things most small sites haven't gotten to yet. Looked great under the hood. Then the content score came back low, and that was the story. Great bones, but almost nothing built on them. A handful of thin pages standing in for a real content layer. The read said it straight: the site was selling expertise it wasn't showing anywhere.

That's the part I find useful. Most tools hand you a grade and move on. This one shows you where the gap is, which is usually between what looks fine and what's working. And it's specific to your site, not a checklist anyone could run.

Curious where yours lands? Takes about half a minute here: https://shanegring.com/scan

After a couple years of building with AI for clients, here's where I've landed:

❌ it's only okay at making things from scratch.

✅ It's terrific at reworking what you've already built.

One client had a decade's worth of materials available. Hundreds of workouts, 600+ videos, years of teaching. All that IP was real, but we needed to repackage it into solutions that appealed to broader audiences. So we did.

That's the situation AI is built for, because it can ingest a ton of assets and help you remix them into courses / programs / standards, at a scale and speed that wasn't available to a small team before.

But the prerequisite is you. It's your ideas and your IP.

So when people ask me if AI can build their content, my honest answer is: it can rebuild it beautifully. The first draft of your expertise still has to be you.

If you've been at this a while, you probably have everything conceived -- it's just scattered, and that's fixable.

Just a couple of big dogs hanging out.

This was from a retreat up in the mountains in Canada. The guy next to me is @[Hewitt Tomlin](urn:li:person:-Ep61bfBjZ) someone whose company I'd admired for years and known professionally for a while. We'd traded plenty of messages, been in the same groups, circled each other online. All good hangs as they were.

It wasn't until we spent a few days together, talking work and marriage and kids and the stuff that's really going on, that I felt like I knew him.
By the end of that trip, we decided to do some work together.

I keep coming back to the idea that social media is great for reaching new people. You can meet a lot of folks / stay loosely in touch / keep your name out there. But the real stuff like understanding what someone's actually wrestling with, whether you're compatible working together, how you can help -- almost always happens offline, one on one, when you get in the same room.

Face time is expensive when you're running a business, because it's the first thing to get squeezed; but it's still what turns someone you sort of know into somebody you actually trust.

So yeah, I'm saying this on LinkedIn -- but if there's a lesson for me maybe it's get offline for a bit.

Go have the coffee, take a hike, hang with the big dogs.

A growing share of your website's visitors aren't people anymore. They're AI agents -- someone's assistant, sent out to compare options, check pricing, or figure out what you actually do.

Many sites are nearly unreadable for them. The information a buyer's agent needs is buried in images, tangled in old page builders, or just missing. The agent shows up, shrugs, and reports back on your competitor instead.

Making a site agent-readable isn't exotic work. Clean structure, real text where it matters, the key facts stated plainly. A lot of seemingly unsexy fixes, but they compound.

I built a scanner that checks how your site reads to an agent -- shanegring.com/scan if you're curious.

It'll hit you with a few findings and 2 actionable ideas to make the most of your site.

I struggle to talk about what I do.

Not because it's complicated. Because the problem a client brings me is almost never the problem I end up solving.

They come in saying "we need a new website" or "we made some bad hires" or "our marketing isn't working." Real concerns, sincerely held. But a few weeks in, the actual problem is usually sitting one layer down, somewhere nobody was looking.

Which makes the marketing weird. I can't put the deliverable on a services page, because the deliverable is finding out what the deliverable should be.

What I've landed on, at least for now: the first thing I sell isn't a solution. It's problem definition. An outside set of eyes with no attachment to the story the team has been telling itself.

That early phase turns out to be where most of the value lives. Everything after it is execution.

Still working out how to say that in a headline. If you've figured out how to market work that starts with "I don't know yet," I'd genuinely like to hear it.

A client of mine runs a software company doing about $10M a year. One of their most promising lead generators is a spreadsheet.

Their product helps coaches manage training programs. It's a really great tool with thousands of customers, but a lot of coaches out there still live in Excel.

And no amount of marketing was going to talk them out of it.

So instead of fighting the habit, they bought a small brand that makes Excel templates for that exact crowd. Now the templates sit at the top of the funnel.

A coach grabs a free spreadsheet, likes it, and soon enough they're ready to hear about the software version.

I love this move because it starts from where the customer actually is. Not where the roadmap says they should be.

Most businesses have a version of this: some "outdated" thing your customers keep doing that you've been treating as a problem. It might be a door.

Worth a look at what your customers refuse to quit using, because there might be an opportunity there.

We'll rebuild your Squarespace website for free.

The full, actual thing: you drop your URL and email at shanegring.com/scan, and within a few day you get back a working rebuild of your site -- faster, cleaner, and readable by the AI agents that are starting to do a lot of the browsing out there.

Why free? Because it's the fastest way to show you what I do instead of describing it.

If the rebuild's useful, great, take it or inspo from it. If you want help taking it further, that's a conversation we should have.

If not, you got a better website out of a two-minute form.

Check out shanegring.com/scan if you want a look at yours.

We'll rebuild your Squarespace website for free.

The full, actual thing: you drop your URL and email at shanegring.com/scan, and within about 48 hours you get back a working rebuild of your site -- faster, cleaner, and readable by the AI agents that are starting to do a lot of the browsing out there.

Why free? Honestly, because it's the fastest way to show you what I do instead of describing it.

If the rebuild's useful, great, take it or inspo from it. If you want help taking it further, that's a conversation we should have.

If not, you got a better website out of a two-minute form.

Check out shanegring.com/scan if you want a look at yours.

A founder I work with sends me a sketch or maybe a half-formed idea most weeks.

He's the visionary, the face of the thing, and he's chock full of ideas. It's my job to help him realize those ideas.

He brings me a concept, and I think through what it does to the rest of the system: the tech it'll take, what it does to the model, where it fits with everything else already running.

I free him up to keep dreaming the next thing, because he's not worried about tracking what it will do to the business and how it'll get done.

For a lot of founders, it's hard to find an operator to keep things organized. The ideas are usually there.

What's missing is someone you can rely on to catch them and turn them into something the business can carry.

Most websites get built to be looked at. I'd rather build one you can run the business from.

Here's the difference. A brochure site points at your business from the outside. You build it once, hand it to marketing, and move on. Then the business keeps moving and the site doesn't. Give it a year and it's describing a company that doesn't quite exist anymore.

It didn't break. It just stopped, because everything that runs the business went on living somewhere else. In a few people's heads. In a doc nobody opens.

A site you run the business from holds the real thing -- what you offer, how you decide who it's for, how the work gets done, what's true right now. Once it does, sales points to it instead of re-explaining. New hires learn off it instead of asking around. Everyone works from one version instead of seven.

That's the whole idea. One source of what's true, out where the team can see it, instead of scattered across the people who happen to hold it.

Here's what I'm thinking: https://shanegring.com/approach

The best sales advice I ever got was to stop selling.

A mentor of mine, Ken, runs his whole business this way. He gets on a call and doesn't pitch. He doesn't talk price. He digs into your problem until he understands it and starts helping.

His line is that he wants to be sure he can add real value before he asks for anything. So he does. He gets in, figures out what's going on, and lets that be the proof.

By the time cost comes up, the trust is already there.

I've been trying to run more like that. Get in, look around, be useful first. Tell you the truth about what I see, even when the truth is "you don't need me for this."

It's slower than a hard pitch. But the relationships it builds tend to outlast the deal, and they send other people your way.

The most convincing thing you can do is to be useful first.

This is me three years ago (to the date!), hauling myself to breakfast on a freshly rolled ankle.

Funny story: We were at a pit-stop in the middle of an eight-hour road trip to the Outer Banks. We got out for dinner, and we were just playing at a playground with two of our girls.

Next thing I know, I'm at the hospital with a sprained ankle and have to spend the trip at the beach with a brace and crutches.

...and poor Skyler (my wife), having to lug chairs/coolers/umbrellas, a 3 year old, a 8 month old, and ME back and forth everyday from the sand.

----

Being laid up got me thinking about something I see all the time.

A lot of the groups I've been working with only run well when one person's in the room. Usually the founder. They're the one who knows how it all fits together, so the day they're out -- traveling / sick / getting treated for rolled ankles -- the whole thing freezes till they're back.

Things may work despite those pauses, but it's a fragile way to run, and most founders can feel it's just a matter of time before it costs them.

It's a fixable problem. One thing I've seen help is getting the stuff that lives only in their head down on paper. Find the specific spots where everything waits on you, and start there.

If you couldn't show up for two weeks, what would stop moving? That's where I usually start with folks, and it can be liberating to get those blockers out of the way.

The people I work with are sitting on more than they realize.

If you've built a real method over the years -- a way of doing things, a content library, the stuff that makes you you -- AI can take all that and help you repackage it in more shapes than you'd think.

A client I've been working with, a golf fitness brand, built over about a decade, had a considerable amount of resources.

600+ videos, hundreds of workouts, a big engaged audience, real revenue. The method was all there. It just lived mostly in the founder's head and scattered across the library.

So we got it out. Indexed everything they had, then set up a weekly call where I'd ask him questions and let him talk, getting the method down on paper, tagged, organized into a knowledge base. Once it hit a critical mass, we could shape it into a certification with course modules, all pulling from the same source.

That's where AI shines, in my experience. It's great at ingesting what you've already built and helping you reorganize and remix it at scale.

If you've been at something a while, there's a decent chance it's more sellable, in more forms, than it feels right now.

Happy to walk through how we did it if that's useful.

My friend, a CEO was stuck. He had rode the wave of his product's success, and rocked with the team that got him there -- but when they hit the next plateau of growth, his young team just didn't have the experience needed to help them to the next level.

Folks had been promoted into positions that didn’t align with their strengths; they’d hired a few roles that hadn’t worked out; it felt like things weren't gelling.

When I got in there, the people were sharp, but the setup underneath them wasn’t.

Marketing and sales were running in separate silos with no real handoff. Data wasn’t being tracked, so nobody could say what was working or why something stopped when it did.

So they felt a symptom, named it "wrong hires," and felt stuck. The thing actually costing them was one step underneath, where nobody was looking.

That's almost always how it goes. The problem a business can name out loud isn’t always the whole story.

Before you hire, or fire, or buy the new tool, get someone to look at how the work actually moves between people. What's slowing you down is usually in the handoffs / the missing data / the stuff nobody owns.

Found this one cleaning out an old photo folder.

Just me, over a decade ago, giving the camera a mean mug outside an event for young entrepreneurs, hosted by the Obama Administration at the White House. We were wide-eyed and aspirational about how we thought business could help better the world (more on that some other time).

I remember it was a bunch of us from around the world with early business ideas, brought together for talks and a Q&A and the usual networking. Mark Cuban was in the room, which felt like a big deal at the time. I remember feeling very official and having very little idea what I was doing.

I realized that I've sort of been doing some version of the work I do now for a lot longer than I was aware.

Back then, it was circling sustainability and standards and getting myself off the ground. These days I’m working with founders and small teams who've outgrown the way they started.

I’ve got a new badge, but it’s the same type of work -- find what's stuck /broken / holding you back and getting it moving again.

Here’s something I've been meaning to share.

I built a free scanner tool that reads your website the way AI does and tells you how ready it is.

Drop in a URL, and it comes back with a real overview: can AI actually find you, can the site drive its own SEO and content, and could it be a foundation you build on instead of a brochure you keep patching?

It's a score and a short read, written about your site, with the one or two moves that matter most to you.

Why free? Honestly, I'm already poking around sites like this all the time, it's a lot of what I do. I'd rather point that at yours and hand you something useful. Takes about half a minute, one read per site, and a copy lands in your inbox.

If the read points somewhere worth going, let me know if you want to chat. If you just want to know where you stand, that's the whole point of it.

https://shanegring.com/scan

Most websites are more of a brochure than anything else. They say what you do, and you hope someone reads it.

Big brain moment: they ought to be more than that.

If you build it in a format AI can actually read and pull from, it stops being a set of pages and becomes a marketing hub -- the thing everything runs off of.

Once it's set up right, you can point AI at your own site to spin up landing pages / campaigns / fresh SEO / even social, all pulling from the same source, all sounding like you.

The website becomes the clay, and you shape everything else from it.

Most sites can't do this yet. They were built to be looked at, and using them to make things is a different job. WordPress, Squarespace, a stack of plugins, all fine for a brochure.

That's the work I'm loving: getting a business's site into a shape where AI can do the heavy lifting off it.

Spent the last little while rebuilding how a client (a wellness-focused brand) handles their visual asset creation.

...and it drove home a discovery:

Using tools (like Figma or your website) to consolidate your brand into a source of truth can make it easier for AI to help you draft on-brand, high-res visuals in minutes.

For years, they were dealing with assets made reactively -- and every graphic drifted a little further from the last, until the whole thing looked like five different brands.

There was no single place the design system actually lived.

We built it in @[Figma](urn:li:organization:3650502), one node: colors / type / logo / the components / the rules, all together. We tied that into their automated workflows, and now anyone can make the assets they need, pulled from the same source of truth.

They’re able to spin up landing pages, social graphics, hero images, calculator tools that remain true to their vision.

Before, the people making these assets knew the business but weren’t supposed to be designers. Now, they don't have to be per se. The brand lives in a single system, so they can make genuinely high-res work in minutes.

If you want to try it, it's simpler than it sounds. Keep your brand system in a structured place (Figma's a solid home for it), then use a tool that can read it and build. We've been generating straight off the design system in Claude Design, and it holds up well.

Happy to walk through how we set theirs up if it's useful.

Most teams I meet are busy, but they can’t always say which parts of their work are actually delivering results.

A client brought me in a while back, and things were genuinely going good. It was a SaaS business that had been seeing success based on a great product and strong referrals.

But there wasn't much data being tracked under any of it. Their insights were based on guesswork / vibes / assumptions.

Things would be working, working, working, and then one day, something would stop, and it was tough to say why.

Before we added anything new, we tackled the less-than-exciting part first: a way to track performance and see what was driving results. We found some of their busiest workstreams weren't doing what they thought -- and some were driving more results than anyone realized.

If you're not sure what part of your work actually works, getting good data is a good place to start.