Forty years in the arena.

Every operator starts somewhere. Mine was in the trenches — food service, energy, financial services, building supplies manufacturing. Four industries that taught me the same lesson from different angles.

Business fundamentals don't change with the sector. Customers either come back or they don't. Teams either execute or they unravel. P&Ls either tell the truth or they hide it until it's too late. The vocabulary shifts, but the physics of a healthy company is the same on a manufacturing floor as it is in a branch office.

That cross-industry lens became the foundation for everything that came next. You can't spot the pattern from inside a single vertical. You have to work across enough of them to see what's universal and what's just the local accent.

Every company reaches a moment where it must transform — or start to decline. That moment is here, and it's called AI.

I've watched a lot of shifts over a long career. Most of them were incremental. A few were genuine inflection points — the kind where the businesses that recognized the curve early compounded for a decade while the ones that waited got flattened. AI is one of those.

The operators I work with aren't asking whether AI matters. They're asking something harder: where do I start, what do I stop doing, and who on my team is actually going to drive this? Those are the questions that built Monomoy Strategies.

The name comes from Monomoy Point, the lighthouse at the elbow of Cape Cod. In a place where the currents change the coastline every storm, the light is what keeps the captain from running aground. That's the job: not telling you where to go, but making sure you can see the rocks before you hit them.