Tony Jeary is writing the foreword to Hands Up. When he said yes, he told me he was proud of me, and I sat with that for longer than I would normally admit.
There is a symmetry to it that I did not plan. Tony is writing the opening pages of a book about a twenty-year career in the trades — and he is the reason that career exists.
The door I did not know was there
In 2008, Tony was keynoting Mitsubishi's Diamond Dealer conference. Diamond Dealer is not a casual room. It is where the top-performing Mitsubishi dealers in the country convene, and the designation is not handed out lightly.
He told the organizers they should book me too.
I want to be clear about what that was. I was not a known quantity in the trades. I had not earned that stage on reputation, because I did not yet have one in that industry. Tony saw something in me that I had not seen in myself, and he opened a door I did not know was there to open.
What I said in that room was that search was about to decide which contractors got found. In 2008, to that audience, that was not a welcome message. It sounded like a distraction from real business. I have spent the years since watching it become the whole game, and then watching the game change again.
Everything downstream of that morning — the clients, the company, the bet on AI, this book — traces back to a man deciding that someone else deserved the microphone.
The four things he taught me
Tony became my coach a couple of years after I founded CI Web Group. I was running the company on instincts I had assembled from the corporate world, and instincts are not a system.
Four frameworks came out of that work. They are still the operating system underneath how I run things.
- High Leverage Activities. In any week, a small handful of activities produce most of the value and the rest produce motion. The idea is simple. Living by it is not.
- Clarity, Focus, and Execution. Three disciplines, in order. Get clear on what you are trying to do. Narrow to the few things that matter. Execute relentlessly on those. Most operators are weak in at least one of the three, and the weak one sets the ceiling.
- How to choose a mentor — and how to exit one fast. Most operators lose years to mentors who are not qualified for their specific situation. The person who built a brick-and-mortar retail empire may have nothing useful to say about your problem.
- The four-quadrant time matrix. Important and urgent, important but not urgent, urgent but not important, neither. The discipline is not the grid — it is what you do with the second quadrant.
That last one changed the most. Nearly every good decision I have made lived in important but not urgent: the 2008 search bet, narrowing the company to the trades, the restructure, rebuilding on our own platform. None of them were on fire. That is precisely why there was room to make them well.
It is also why I do not wait for something to become urgent before I act on it. By the time a shift is urgent, the good positions are taken and you are paying full price for a seat you could have had cheap.
The belief window
The concept Tony is best known for teaching is the belief window. He is careful to say he did not invent it, but I have never heard anyone use it better.
The idea: every one of us carries a set of principles about how the world works, and most of them we did not choose. They came from our families, our teachers, our coaches, and eventually our own experience. We operate on them without re-examining them.
Two things go wrong. Some of those principles were never true. And some were absolutely true, for years, until technology changed them.
The second one is the dangerous category, because nothing announces itself. The principle worked for a decade. It kept working right up until it did not, and the failure shows up as a slow leak rather than a break.
"We get all our work from referrals." "Our customers do not shop online." "SEO is something we can look at later." Every one of those was defensible at some point. Every one of them has ended a company.
What Tony made me realize is that if I changed the way I saw the world, the world could ultimately change. That sentence sounds soft until you try to live it, and then you discover it requires you to be publicly wrong about things you used to say with confidence.
The part I did not expect
Years later, after the agency had grown and the trades had taken over my career and the bet that started in that Mitsubishi room had been validated more times than I can count, Tony Jeary became a client of CI Web Group.
The man who recommended me for a stage I had not earned yet hired the company that stage made possible. I do not have a framework for what that felt like.
What to do with this
This is not a thank-you note, or not only one. There is something usable here.
Audit your own window. Write down five things you believe about how customers find you, what they trust, and how your work gets produced. For each one, ask when you last tested it against evidence rather than memory. The ones you cannot date are the ones to worry about.
Use his mentor rule. Choose people qualified for your actual situation, not people who are impressive in general. And leave quickly when the fit is wrong — that is the half of the framework nobody applies.
Open a door for someone. This is the one I would push hardest. Tony's recommendation cost him nothing measurable and altered the entire direction of my working life. You almost certainly have that power over someone right now, and it will not feel significant when you use it.
The frameworks were valuable. The door mattered more. If you are far enough along to be reading this, you are far enough along to be the person who opens one.
Thank you, Tony — for the room in 2008, for the frameworks, and for the pages at the front of this book.