The storm is the point.

I started at a bench in South Carolina, a formulations chemist doing R&D for the metal finishing industry. Printed circuit boards. Computer hard drives. Lawn mower engines. Surgical instruments. Motorcycle parts that had to come out of the tank looking like jewelry, because on a show bike the part is the product. What I learned there is the thing everything since has been built on: the right answer means nothing until somebody can act on it.

I was also, at night, running a company I'd founded called Media One Consulting, building websites and doing SEO in 2001, when that was barely a job. Chemist by day. That's the first version of a pattern that never stopped.

Then Vertex Pharmaceuticals: chemical modeling, patent research, intellectual property analysis. Building tools at the intersection of science, data and software about a decade before anybody called that a job description. Patent research is a strange education. The entire job is working out whether the thing in front of you is actually new, or whether somebody already did it and wrote it down. You spend your days deciding what matters inside an ocean of things that don't.

Then two years inside Fujifilm's environmental health and safety group. TSCA filings, the paperwork that tells the federal government which chemicals you have and what you're doing with them, and ISO 14001 internal audits, which meant walking plants around the country with a clipboard, checking how each one managed the ways a room could kill somebody.

Digital strategy for pharma and biotech inside WPP: Novartis, Pfizer, AstraZeneca, GSK, Genzyme, Takeda, where every pitch runs through legal, medical and regulatory review before it reaches anybody who can say yes, and clarity isn't a style point, it's the price of entry. Enterprise search at iProspect for TiVo, Equinix, Robert Half. Then ten years as an equity partner and principal at 451 Marketing, leading a team of twenty-five for Ericsson, AstraZeneca, Hologic and Insulet.

In 2019 I founded Points South Consulting. Second company. Same pattern as the first one.

SFW:Unlocked is what all of it turned into. Twenty-five years of watching capable people do unfocused work, and asking the same question every time: so f***ing what?

The framework became a system. The system became a book. And it's now the filter behind every AI tool I build: fifteen-plus of them running inside real businesses, plus SFWRecon, a prospect-intelligence platform I built and am still shaping.

I've also worked the other side of publishing. I ran digital marketing on the campaign for The Intellectual Devotional, which became a New York Times bestseller.

SFW started in agencies. The question doesn't stay there.

It applies to how you lead teams. How you decide under pressure. How you communicate when the stakes are high. How you build a career, and a life, that isn't just busy.

The book is written from the agency chair because that's where the receipts are. The framework is built for anyone who wants to stop doing things that don't matter.

• In business for myself since 2001Media One Consulting, founded while I was still working a bench job. Points South Consulting, founded 2019.
• Twenty years in agenciesWPP, iProspect, ten years as an equity partner at 451 Marketing. Strategy, media, ops, digital, from inside the building.
• Before that, the labFormulations chemistry, patent research and bioinformatics at Vertex, regulatory compliance and ISO auditing at Fujifilm.
• 15+ AI systems in productionContent, research, reporting, business development. Running right now.
• So F***ing What?, the bookEight frameworks and one filter. Manuscript complete. Read about it