I have been CEO of CI Web Group since I founded it in 2006. That is not a flex. It is a dataset. Two decades of hiring, firing, partnering, restructuring, keynoting, parenting, grandparenting, and rebuilding a company from 320 people to 38 while holding revenue above ten million dollars.
If you are looking for a highlight reel, this is the wrong essay. If you want what actually stuck — the lessons that changed how I lead — keep reading.
What being CEO is, after twenty years
CEO is not a title you grow into by accumulating opinions. It is ownership of three things nobody else can delegate forever: architecture, judgment, and the public scoreboard. I wrote the AI-era version in The CEO in an AI-First Company. The human version is older and harder.
Architecture is how the company runs when you are not there — people, systems, incentives, data flow. Judgment is what you still decide by hand because it touches values, risk, or a person's future. The scoreboard is what you are willing to be graded on out loud — wins and misses.
When does the CEO job actually change?
Every year. Not incrementally — in kind. Year one you sell. Year five you manage managers. Year ten you realize half your calendar is politics dressed as operations. Year fifteen you either rebuild or slowly become the bottleneck you swore you would never be.
The inflection for me was the restructure: stopping the company organized around tasks and rebuilding it around an intelligence layer. That is the SME Inversion at company scale — experts become engineers of systems, then stewards of what ships. I tell that story in From 320 to 38.
What twenty years taught me that no MBA did
- Culture is what you tolerate. Perks are decoration. Accountability is culture. I wrote more in Culture Isn't Perks—It's Accountability.
- Systems beat heroes. Heroes burn out. Systems scale care. See Systems and Soul.
- The customer is not your autobiography. Client-first is a discipline, not a slogan — The Client-First Inversion.
- Your brand is a file now. AI agents read entity data before they read your ad copy. That changed how we build everything.
- Family sharpens judgment. My son Torel and my grandson Dallas remind me daily that leadership is legacy, not LinkedIn. The trades I speak to are full of owners who understand that without needing it explained.
What it cost
The expensive lessons are not the failures you announce. They are the slow ones — keeping the wrong leaders too long, confusing loyalty with performance, letting fear drive headcount instead of architecture. I catalog those categories in The Leadership Lessons That Cost Me the Most.
The CEO job is not to have every answer. It is to build a company where the right answers compound — and to name out loud when you were wrong.
Proof in the work
Women in HVACR and Women We Admire did not ask me to speak because I had a perfect track record. They asked because I show up honest about an industry in transition — Daikin partner since the late 2000s, trades marketing rebuilt for AI search and agents, a book (Hands Up) that reads like a letter because it is one.
Chris, my cousin and our CTO, holds the technical architecture so I can hold the company architecture. That separation is not nepotism — it is clarity. CEOs who try to be CTO, CMO, and CHRO simultaneously build fragile companies.
Your next step
Write one page: what you uniquely decide today, what should be a system by next quarter, and one promise you will review in public with a date on it. If your leadership team needs the twenty-year view compressed into a room, book a keynote. If you want operator-level help on the rebuild, work with me.