The AI said my files were empty. Every byte was still there.
My phone-side AI reported a project's notes as empty and refused to save a spreadsheet. A desktop audit found zero data loss. The failure was confidence, not storage.
Remco Livain
Half the inbound was never human. Qualify it before your sales team clears an hour.
A five-step triage ladder any company can automate — form screening, sender confirmation, records check, fit, intent — so sales teams answer real requests fast and stop losing hours to the rest.
A month of spend, zero sales. The hard part was deciding which zeros were real.
AI pulled thirty days of ad receipts for a furniture brand in an hour. The judgement was sorting real zeros from scheduled zeros from broken-measurement zeros before cutting the budget.
Your distributors learn from each other. They should be learning with each other.
Distributor networks over-invest in meet-ups and QBRs and under-invest in the one thing that transfers between markets: playbooks. The difference between learning from each other and learning with each other.
People spend weeks choosing a sofa. Most furniture brands sell like it's one visit.
Two-thirds of the furniture journey is digital and buyers touch your site around 11 times before they commit — but half still buy in-store. How people really buy home & living now, and what brands keep getting wrong.
I put every hour in the quote. Clients argue less when they can see the working.
Most consultants bury the fee in one all-in number. On a proposal for a dental client I itemized every hour and rate instead — and the negotiation got shorter, not longer. Why operational transparency is the pitch.
Cowork reached my phone this week. I still can't tell where chat ends and Cowork begins.
Anthropic put Claude Cowork on mobile this week and OpenAI shipped ChatGPT Work days later. The Code-vs-Cowork line is clean; the Chat-vs-Cowork line still isn't. An operator's honest map of a messy, powerful moment.
The industry column was wrong on two-thirds of the list. I checked every one.
A sales list arrived neatly tagged by industry. Two-thirds of the tags were wrong. Why the confident-looking label is the base rate to distrust — and why AI makes checking cheap, not optional.
Where headquarters ends and the distributor begins
Your distributors keep asking HQ for more support. The real gap is quieter: nobody ever agreed where headquarters' responsibility for growth ends and the distributor's begins. Here's how to draw the line, market by market.
Our au pair flew home last night. The house is quieter this morning.
A year with an au pair — what it made possible for our family, and a thank-you at the end of a chapter we'd choose again without hesitating.