A decade spent trying to
make myself unnecessary.

It began with a person. The woman I wanted to build a life with was in Japan, and I was finishing university in Washington, D.C. Nobody was going to employ me in America and let me live on the other side of the world, so the income would have to be built.

I looked at the unglamorous part of the economy: cleaning, lawn care, junk removal, the ordinary services people need in every town. The work happens locally, but much of the company does not. Enquiries, booking, scheduling, follow-up, quality control and hiring can all be run from a desk anywhere. In my final semester I started a cleaning company with seven hundred dollars and no industry experience. What I did have was a useful constraint: I was not going to be there. Not sometimes. Ever.

The full story: The Long-Distance Business →

Most service business problems are solved the same way. The owner appears, absorbs the confusion, and saves the day. That can feel responsible while teaching the business never to cope without them. I would not have that option from Japan. So Think Maids was built as infrastructure rather than a series of rescues: phones answered by people hired for warmth and trained with documentation; scheduling, quality control, hiring and payroll each written down, tested, and handed over.

A few months after graduation I moved to Japan. The company stayed in Washington while I worked from a desk overlooking a small Tokyo park. Customers did not know where I was. More importantly, they did not need to. Think Maids grew into a national cleaning company, and I never met a customer.

How the business learned to run without me: Halloween, 2016 →

Owners began asking how it worked, then more owners. They ran into the same wall I had: there was always a category of work that apparently only the owner could do. On inspection, most of it was undocumented, poorly bounded, or never genuinely delegated. In 2017 that need became Inova Local, the first virtual staffing agency dedicated to home services, built from the Think Maids operating team and run alongside it for the next eight years. It made the remote local model possible for any owner with a phone number and a willingness to hand things over. Inova went on to serve companies across North America, including national franchises and Inc. 5000 operators, and thousands of operators now run the model.

Why I Built a Staffing Agency →

In 2018 the work became the Local Business MBA. It began with a simple question: what would business education look like if the final project were a company you owned? The programme teaches the sequence I wish I had understood at the start: choose practical demand, launch simply, build reliable acquisition, make delivery repeatable, hire carefully, and gradually remove the owner from routine decisions. More than 250 students in sixteen-plus countries have been through it. It also gave me an idea I still use: the business itself is the course of study.

Teaching It: how the school began →

In 2024 an industry buyer acquired Think Maids, eight years after I started it and never having seen me on site. The sale answered a harder question than whether the company could make money: it showed that the systems, the team and the customer relationships had value without the founder attached. In 2025 Inova Local was acquired by private equity. In between, I bought two cleaning companies in Florida and Texas, put them on the same playbook, and sold them on within the year. Four exits, none of which required me in the building.

Our son arrived this year. It is hard to describe how quickly that reorganises a person’s sense of what time is for. I had spent a decade making businesses need me less. The question that arrived with him was simpler and harder: what was all the building for?

The businesses were never the final point. They were vehicles for a life, and for work that could be useful to other people. Alongside them there has always been a Zen practice, which taught me to distrust unnecessary motion, to notice how tightly I hold plans, and to simplify before adding. Those lessons showed up in the companies as fewer priorities, clearer roles, and a willingness to let other people solve problems differently from me.

Freedom is valuable, but it is incomplete on its own. The question that follows is what the freedom is for. Family, study, service, health, creative work, another company, or simply the ability to meet life with more attention are all good answers. A business that gives more back than it takes leaves room for them.

So this is where a decade landed. The Optional Owner grew out of the remote local model: first a way to run one company from another country, then, once the delegation layer existed for everyone, a broader question about any business. It has widened since to other kinds of business, with the practical work still underneath. Most businesses begin dependent on their owner, and the problem is only when they stay that way. An Optional Owner moves knowledge, decisions and execution into systems and people, progressively, until their presence becomes a choice rather than a requirement. Build it, systemise it and step back from it, so you can choose where you are useful. That is what I am writing and teaching now, and it is the thread that runs through everything else on this site.

The Same Question, a Little Deeper →