I didn't set out to build four companies. I set out to find one that didn't make me want to put my head through a wall. I couldn't find it. So I kept building.
That's the honest version. There's no grand vision origin story here, no napkin sketch from a college dorm, no moment where I "saw the future." I saw the present, and the present was terrible. Every industry I touched had the same disease: big promises, slow delivery, and a business model built around the assumption that customers would tolerate mediocrity because switching is painful.
So here's the story of four companies. Each one exists because an entire industry kept underdelivering, and I got tired of waiting for someone else to fix it.
SkyNet MTS: Because Every MSP I Knew Was Lying
I spent years in managed IT before I started SkyNet MTS. I worked with MSPs. I competed against MSPs. I watched how they operated from the inside out. And I kept seeing the same pattern.
The sales pitch was always incredible. "We'll be your IT department. Proactive monitoring. Fast response times. We've got you covered." Then the contract gets signed and reality shows up. Tickets sit for hours. The senior tech who sold the deal disappears and you get the new guy who's never seen your network. Everything outside a narrow scope is a billable surprise. And when you call to complain, you get the same line: "We're just really slammed right now."
No, you're not slammed. You're understaffed on purpose because your margins look better when you run lean and let clients absorb the pain.
I built SkyNet MTS on two principles that apparently qualify as radical in this industry: respond fast and do what you said you'd do. Our average response time is a fraction of the industry standard. Not because we figured out some proprietary framework. Because we decided that when a client's server goes down, that's a right-now problem, and we staffed and built systems to treat it that way.
That shouldn't be a differentiator. The fact that it is tells you everything about managed IT.
RevealSec: Because Pentests Shouldn't Cost More Than Your Car
Once SkyNet was running, I started sending clients to cybersecurity firms for penetration testing. The experience was brutal.
The big firms wanted $40,000 to $60,000. For a small business. They'd show up with a team of five, run automated scans that any competent tech could run in an afternoon, then hand over a 200-page PDF that nobody would ever read. The recommendations were generic. The follow-up was nonexistent. And the whole engagement felt designed to justify the price tag rather than actually improve security.
Meanwhile, the cheap options were even worse. Fly-by-night shops running Nessus, slapping a logo on the output, and calling it a penetration test. That's a vulnerability scan. It's not the same thing, and selling it as one is borderline fraud.
So I built RevealSec. A penetration testing firm for businesses that can't write a six-figure check for security but still deserve to know where their real vulnerabilities are. Real testing. Real findings. Reports that a business owner can actually understand and act on. At a price that doesn't require board approval.
Small businesses are the number one target for cyberattacks, and the security industry has priced them out of the one service that actually tells them where they're exposed. That's not a market gap. That's malpractice.
MSP Dispatch: Because Answering Services Don't Speak Tech
Here's something nobody outside the MSP world knows: most managed IT providers outsource their after-hours calls to generic answering services. The same call centers that answer for dentists, plumbers, and law firms.
So when your server goes down at 8 PM and you call your IT provider's emergency line, you get someone reading from a script who doesn't know the difference between a firewall and a file share. They take a message. They "escalate." Which means they send an email that your on-call tech might see in an hour. Maybe.
The alternative? An AI chatbot that asks you to describe your problem in a text box while your entire team is locked out of their systems. Fantastic.
I built MSP Dispatch because MSPs deserve an answering service that actually understands technology. Human operators. Trained specifically for IT support calls. They know what questions to ask. They know what constitutes a real emergency versus a "this can wait until morning." They know how to get the right information to the right tech without playing telephone.
It seems obvious. Every MSP owner I've talked to says the same thing: "I've been looking for this." They were looking for it because it didn't exist. The answering service industry never bothered to build it because MSPs are a niche market, and niche markets don't interest companies optimized for volume.
Elevate AI: Because "AI-Powered" Doesn't Mean What They Think It Means
This one is personal. I've spent the last few years building real AI systems. Not chatbots. Not "AI-enhanced" marketing copy generators. Actual autonomous systems that make decisions, take actions, and replace manual workflows that used to require a full-time employee.
And in the process, I've watched an entire industry spring up around selling repackaged templates and calling them AI. Vendors charging $2,000 a month for a GPT wrapper with their logo on it. "AI consultants" whose entire expertise is knowing which SaaS tool to recommend. Companies spending six figures on "digital transformation" projects that amount to connecting Zapier to their CRM.
Small businesses are getting ripped off. They're being told that AI is either too expensive, too complex, or too risky for them. Meanwhile, the technology has gotten to the point where a 20-person company can automate workflows that Fortune 500 companies still do manually. But only if someone builds it right. Custom. For their actual business. Not a one-size-fits-all product with "AI" in the name.
Elevate AI exists to build that. Custom AI systems for small businesses. The kind of automation that actually replaces work, not the kind that creates a new dashboard nobody checks.
The Common Thread
Four companies, four industries, one pattern: build what you wished existed.
Every single one of these businesses started the same way. I went looking for a service. The service was either overpriced, underdelivered, or built for enterprise customers who could absorb the dysfunction. Small businesses were left with the scraps. And nobody seemed particularly motivated to fix it because the status quo was profitable enough.
That's the part that gets me. It's not that these industries can't do better. It's that they've decided they don't have to. They've calculated that the cost of losing a few frustrated clients is lower than the cost of actually delivering what they promised. And for most of them, that math works out. Until someone shows up and builds the thing that should have existed all along.
I don't have a monopoly on this. The playbook is simple. Find an industry that's coasting on customer inertia. Build something that treats small businesses like they matter. Be transparent about how things actually work. Move fast. Keep your promises. That's it.
What's Next
People ask me if I'm done. If four companies is enough. The honest answer is: I don't know. I'm not looking for the next thing. But I wasn't looking for the last three either. They found me. Or more accurately, the frustration found me, and I responded the only way I know how.
If I build a fifth company, it'll be because some other industry decided that good enough was good enough, and I disagreed. That's the whole pattern. That's the whole story.
Every company I've built exists because someone else decided small businesses weren't worth the effort. I decided they were.