Three months in a motel room
For three months, my business ran out of a motel room in Fresno. Me, my girlfriend, who was pregnant at the time, and our baby. One room. I took client calls in the bathroom with the fan on so it sounded like an office instead of a place where a baby was crying. I filed paperwork on the bed because there was no desk. When I needed to print something, I drove to a print shop.
I want to be careful how I tell this part, because it would be easy to make it sound braver than it felt. It didn't feel brave. It felt like the bottom. Every morning I woke up in that room and did the math on how many jobs I needed that week to not end up somewhere worse.
That was not that long ago. Today the same business runs mostly without me touching it. This is how that happened, and why I'm now looking for five small business owners here in Fresno to do it for.
What I walked away from
Before any of this, I was a Surgical Tech III in Fresno. If you don't know the title, it means I was in the operating room. Not observing. Scrubbed in, hands in the field, passing instruments, anticipating what the surgeon needed before they asked.
I did cardiac. I did trauma. I did vascular. And toward the end of my career, I did a lot of high-risk pregnancy surgery: ectopic pregnancies, deliveries and operations where the mother's life was genuinely on the line. Those are the cases people picture when they imagine a hospital at its most serious. I was the one in that room.
I'm not saying that to impress anybody. I'm saying it because when people hear that someone left healthcare to do automation for small businesses, they picture somebody who was bored at a desk. I wasn't bored. I had a real job that mattered, and I was good at it.
Why I left anyway
COVID burned me out. I don't have a more sophisticated way to say it. The hours, the volume, what we saw, and the way it just kept going. I came out the other side of that not being the same about the work.
And then I did the math. Honest math, on paper. I looked at what I made, what I'd make in five years, what the ceiling was, and what that life would actually look like. The number didn't get me where I wanted to go. Not close. I could work that hard for another twenty years and still be doing the same arithmetic every month.
My daughter was on the way. And I felt God telling me something pretty plainly: if you're going to trust me, do it now. Not after you've saved up. Not once it's safe. Now.
So I left. No backup plan, no side income, no runway. I understand how that sounds. I'd probably tell somebody else not to do it. But it was a leap of faith, and I took it.
Then it didn't work
Here's the part people leave out of these stories.
I started a notary business first. Moved my family to Nevada for it. It didn't work. I don't have a dramatic reason. It just didn't. I learned a lot about what I'd actually signed up for, which was the real return on it, but it didn't pay.
So we came back to California, and I slept on a friend's couch. That's where I bought my LLC for Central Valley Process Servers in 2024. From a couch. I want to be clear that there was no moment where it clicked and the money started. I filed paperwork on a couch and then had to go figure out how to make it real.
I also went back to surgery for a few months in there. I want to be honest about that, because it's not a straight line. I tried to go back. And it wasn't for me anymore. The hospitals felt profit-first in a way I couldn't unsee once I'd seen it, and morale kept getting crushed. Good people, ground down. I couldn't do it a second time.
After that came the motel.
The climb
After three months, my business got us out of that motel room and into a converted garage. No heat, no air conditioning. In Fresno, that means you're genuinely cold in January and genuinely miserable in July.
I didn't care even a little. We were off the street, and we were there because of work I'd done. That mattered more to me than the temperature.
Somewhere in there, my girlfriend and I split up, and I was on my own raising my daughter. Rent was $1,150 a month, plus PG&E, plus gas, plus supplies, plus food. That number doesn't sound like much to a lot of people. It was everything to me. There were nights I cried after she went to sleep because I could not see where the next month's money was coming from.
And somehow I made it. Every month. I don't have a clever explanation for that. I served papers, I picked up work, I answered every call, and it came together every single month.
About nine months later, I got a real apartment. Heat, air conditioning, a door that locked. Paid for entirely by my business. Nobody co-signed it, nobody helped, no second income. That apartment is the proudest thing I own.
Then success started breaking things
Here's what nobody warns you about: getting busy is its own problem.
Once the work picked up, I started dropping things. Not because I was lazy, but because there was one of me. Follow-ups I meant to make and didn't. Invoices I sent late, or sent wrong, or forgot to send at all. Emails that sat unanswered for three days because I was in my car serving papers. Clients who quietly stopped calling, and I never even knew which ones or why.
That's the thing about a one-person business. You don't lose clients in a dramatic blowup. They slip through a crack you never saw, and you find out months later when you notice somebody hasn't called in a while. If that sounds familiar, it's the same pattern behind every money leak I've watched drain a small operation.
So I stopped. I spent a month, a real month, most of every day, building automation for my own business using AI. Not buying software. Building the thing that actually fit how my business works, because nothing off the shelf did. I taught myself to run it lean, on a $200-a-month subscription, because that's what I could afford.
I got a lot of it wrong first. That month was not a montage. But at the end of it, the follow-ups happened whether I remembered or not. Invoices went out the day the work was done. Nothing sat in my inbox for three days.
Where I am now
My business mostly runs itself.
Some Tuesdays I'm sitting on my couch at ten in the morning and I've already made a few hundred dollars. The intake happened, the follow-up went out, the invoice sent, and I hadn't opened my laptop yet.
I'll be honest. That makes me feel a little guilty. I grew up believing money comes from being tired. Sitting on a couch at 10 a.m. while the work happens doesn't feel like it counts. But I also know what it took to get here, and I worked hard for it. Both of those are true.
Why I'm writing this
In 2021 I sat in front of my computer and asked, pretty bitterly, why other people could make a living on this thing and I couldn't. I'd been reaching for it for years. I bought software I didn't understand. I started things I couldn't finish. I genuinely could not figure out what everybody else seemed to know.
I build it now. That's the whole turn. The thing I couldn't use, I build.
My daughter is four. She doesn't know about the motel, and she never needs to.
What I want to do next is help five small business owners here in Fresno get what I built. Service businesses: law offices, cosmetology, contractors. The kind of business where you're the one answering the phone, and the work you're good at isn't the work that's drowning you.
I'm not asking you to buy anything to find out. I'll sit down with you for an hour, free, at your business or over coffee. You tell me where things are slipping. I'll tell you straight whether this would help you or not, and if it wouldn't, I'll say so, because I'd rather tell you that over coffee than take your money. If you'd rather just start, get started here.
I ran a business out of a motel room in this city. If you're somewhere in the hard part right now, I'm not guessing at what that feels like.