A while back, I blocked my competitors on social media. All of them. I want to be honest about why, because it wasn't noble. It was two things: first, I needed to focus — outrage is a tax on attention, and I had a company to build. Second, frankly, it was a mercy. Watching my posts was making them frantic. The more we shipped, the sillier their content got, and their clients had started stacking my team's calendar — which, believe it or not, was never the objective.
Here's the part I didn't plan: blocking them changed nothing. They kept posting. And the market appointed itself my clipping service — a steady flood of screenshots into my DMs and texts, from contractors and colleagues, with commentary that was, let's say, unflattering to the authors. I stopped watching the feud, and the audience kept sending me the play-by-play.
That flood taught me something more important than anything in the screenshots themselves, and it's the actual subject of this essay: the room is now ahead of the stage.
The camps were built for an audience that no longer exists
In the book, I wrote about how the leaders and marketing agencies in the trades are treating this transition like a political conference — building camps, the AI camp versus the old-school SEO camp, speaking at conferences against each other, publishing content positioned against each other, constructing public personas around winning an argument they themselves invented. And I wrote that the contractor in the audience walks away confused, unsure who to trust, unsure whether to act or wait for the camps to resolve their differences.
I need to update that passage, because something has shifted in the rooms I stand in front of: the contractor in the audience is not confused anymore. Increasingly, the contractor is ahead of the people on the stage.
And it's not close, and it's not luck. While the influencers were feuding, the contractors were learning. Practicing. Prototyping. Building. They've automated a dispatch board, wired an AI agent to their phones, watched a job that took a week collapse into an afternoon — they haven't just heard about the gains, they have felt them, in their own P&L, which is a kind of knowing no keynote can argue with. And they did the quietest, most radical thing of all: they changed their feeds. The influencers they follow now aren't the industry's usual authorities — they're builders, engineers, AI practitioners from far outside the trades. The audience upgraded its information diet while the stage kept performing the same argument.
You cannot fool a room full of builders
This is the mechanism the camps haven't understood: authority just collapsed into demonstrability. A contractor who has built something — even one small automation — can now verify claims instead of trusting titles. They know what a real system feels like versus a cardboard demo. They can look at a shipped component and know within seconds whether your "AI-powered" claim survives contact. In a room full of builders, the loudest argument loses to the smallest demo — every single time.
Which is why the bomb-dropping keeps backfiring in a way I genuinely did not engineer. Every time a competitor posts one of those carefully unnamed grenades — you know the format, "certain agencies are overpromising AI…" — the same thing happens: their own clients read it, recognize the subtext, and call us. Not to gossip. Concerned. Asking some version of the same question: "if my agency is spending its energy arguing against the future, how far behind are they on building it?"
Read that mechanism carefully, because it's the whole lesson: when you position against the future, your clients hear you describing your own roadmap. The subtweet is a referral. Negative campaigning against what's coming reads, to an audience that has already felt what's coming, as a confession.
The part where I mean it about the smile
I want to be careful here, because this could read as a victory lap and that is not what it is. I wrote a whole essay about the line my father gave me — grace under fire as a competitive weapon — and blocking the noise was that line in practice: don't watch, don't retaliate, keep shipping, keep smiling.
And underneath the frustration, I understand the fear. The camp-builders aren't bad people — they're people whose model is genuinely threatened, doing the thing scared institutions always do: turning a transition into a tribal war because a war has sides you can win, while a transition only has work. In the book I said this is not the time for camps — that our industry should behave the way the engineering community has for thirty years: collaboratively, openly, sharing what we learn because the contractors we all serve are better off for it.
And I can prove I mean that, because I've spent the last four years doing it — with partners, with platforms, and yes, with people who technically compete with me. Every partner I have, I have tried to influence toward this future, and many ran with it. Years ago I sat down at a LemonSeed event with Justin Judd, one of the executives at Chiirp. I've spent real hours with my colleagues at Contractor Commerce — who later hired an AI engineer. I've sat with the CEOs of Real Time Marketing, LemonSeed Marketing, Contractor In Charge, and Pink Callers. My team and I have trained the marketing and development teams at Johnstone Supply, Ferguson, and Winsupply. And so many more. Some of those conversations turned into roadmaps; all of them were given freely, because I want this entire ecosystem to make it across — not just my corner of it.
I've always been an open book with anyone who wants to learn, and I will support this industry from as many angles as I possibly can. That isn't changing, and the door is still open. Everything my team learns ends up in essays, on stages, in public arguments you can steal. I'd rather teach a competitor than beat one. But I don't get to choose their strategy — only mine.
To the contractors reading this
You're not behind. You're the opposite of behind — you might be the only people in this industry moving at the actual speed of the moment. Trust what you've felt in your own numbers over what anyone — including me — says from a stage. Keep learning, keep prototyping, keep following builders instead of feuders. And judge every one of us, every agency and every influencer, by the only standard that survives this era: not what we say about each other, but what we can show you we've built.
The stage is still arguing. The room already left for the shop — and it's building. My money, all of it, is on the room.