Free Agency

Last week, I was managing a CRM platform for over 450 loan officers, and this week, I find myself a free agent. I made the announcement with a playful ESPN-style graphic, because if you’re going to get laid off during football season, you might as well have some fun with it.

This is the version without the joke.

I didn't get replaced by AI. I got replaced by my own work.

A mortgage company in a hard market hired me to fix a data problem. They were on Surefire, an aging CRM, and needed to move to Total Expert, one of the best platforms in the industry. So I migrated the data, built the systems, wired up the automations, and trained 450+ loan officers to actually use it.

Then it worked. Everything ran. And a company under real margin pressure looked at a system that no longer visibly required anyone to hold it up, and made a rational decision.

That's the trap. If you're hired to implement, your success looks identical to your redundancy. The better you do the job, the less the job appears to be needed. Nobody gets promoted for the disaster that didn't happen.

This isn't a mortgage problem. It's every migration, every integration, and every "we need someone to clean this up" role in every industry. The person who untangles the mess is the person the mess was justifying.

Two honest things about it.

Their call was defensible. Rates are brutal, volume is down, and cutting a cost center that has finished its stated project is what a spreadsheet tells you to do. I'd have had a hard time arguing the other way from their seat.

And it's probably still wrong. A CRM isn't a bridge you build and walk away from. Adoption drifts, data decays, automations break quietly, new hires never learn the system properly, and eighteen months later somebody is asking why nobody trusts the reports anymore. The savings are immediate. The cost is deferred. That's why this kind of cut keeps happening: the bill doesn't come due while anyone is still looking.

If you're currently the person making something work invisibly, that invisibility is the risk. Not your performance.

The instinct on day one is to open your résumé. Wrong order.

A résumé is a list of jobs. What gets you hired is a list of problems you have personally solved. Those are different documents, and most people only ever write the first one.

So before anything else, open a blank page and write down every system you built, fixed, or rescued. Not your responsibilities. The specific messes.

For each one: what was broken, what you did, what changed. Numbers where you have them, honest estimates where you don't.

Two things happen. You end up with the raw material for every cover letter, interview answer, and post for the next six months. And, less obvious but more valuable, you find out what you're actually good at, which is often not what your title said.

Mine ran to about forty items. Maybe a third were things I had completely forgotten I'd done.

Which is roughly what I expected, and fine.

The thing I keep noticing is that my own criteria have quietly shifted. Ten years ago I'd have taken the biggest title or the most interesting problem and figured out the people later. Now, at this point in my career, who I'd be working with matters as much as what I'd be working on.

That's not a softer standard. It's a harder one, and it's the kind of filter you can only really apply once you've been through enough teams to know the difference a good one makes. I've had projects I'd call unremarkable that were a genuine pleasure because of who was in the room. I've had exciting ones that were miserable for the same reason.

So: still looking, still taking calls, genuinely open. Full-time leadership, fractional, or a company with a growth problem that's actually interesting. But I'm not in a rush to end up somewhere I'd want to leave in a year.

More on how that shakes out as it shakes out. That's the point of doing this in public.

Paint Protection Pros is the one I'd point at first. Paint protection film and ceramic coating is a market where nearly every website is built either for exotic car owners or for the shops themselves. Nobody has bridged the gap for the person with a three-year-old truck who just wants to know whether this is worth fifteen hundred dollars. Pricing is opaque, dealer markup is brutal, and there is no neutral source anywhere in the middle. That's the whole thesis: paint protection for everyone, not just for Lamborghinis. It's live, and it's the asset I'd bet on right now.

LeagueHub is the same shape in a different market. If you're a parent looking for a youth league for your kid, there is no single unbiased place to look. It's scattered across Facebook groups, out-of-date park district pages, and whoever you happen to know. The first job is connecting parents to local leagues. The longer play is back-end software for the volunteer-run organizations that can't justify a monthly SaaS bill, which is most of them. This one is earlier than PPP and will take longer.

Neither makes money yet. Directories are slow builds, and the honest version of year one is filling a database while nobody is watching.

There's also Amplified Marketing Group, the paid media agency I've run since 2017, and this newsletter, which as of today has zero subscribers. I set the whole thing up in about a day, which is either impressive or a sign I was avoiding something harder.

That's the deal with this section. Progress and losses both. A build log where everything works isn't a build log. It's an ad.

See you next Wednesday.

Nick