Optimize for Both

In the technical world, engineers and developers collaborate.

They share their GitHub repositories. They fork each other’s work. They contribute back to the projects they depend on. They publish what they have learned, even when what they have learned is something that took them months of effort to figure out, because they understand that the technology gets better when the community gets better and the community gets better when the people inside it share what they know. The open-source movement that built the modern internet runs on that posture. The frontier AI ecosystem that is reorganizing the trades industry runs on that posture. The technical professions, as a culture, have decided that the work is collective and that the contributions belong to the community.

Right now, in the trades industry, the leaders and the marketing agencies are doing the opposite of that. They are treating this transition like a political conference. They are creating camps — the AI camp and the old-school SEO camp — as if the contractor reading their content has to choose a side. They are speaking at conferences against each other. They are publishing content positioned against each other. They are building public personas around being on the right side of an industry argument that they themselves are creating. The contractor in the audience watches the camp-fighting and walks away confused, unsure who to trust, unsure what to do, unsure whether to act now or wait for the camps to resolve their differences.

This is not the time for camps. This is the time for the trades industry to behave the way the engineering community has been behaving for thirty years — collaboratively, openly, with the assumption that the contractors we all serve are better off when we share what we are learning rather than fence it off as proprietary advantage.

Here is what the camp-creators are missing. Google itself is AI. Google was first to launch SGE, the Search Generative Experience that became AI Overviews. Google has been first to launch the AI agents and AI managers that are now being integrated across the consumer ecosystem. The same Google that the old-school SEO camp has been optimizing for is the company that has been most aggressively building the AI infrastructure the AI camp is racing to keep up with. The two camps are arguing about a distinction that does not exist anymore. The contractor whose website is optimized for old-school Google in 2026 is optimizing for an AI company. The contractor whose website is optimized for AI is optimizing for the platform Google has become. The fight between the camps is therefore a fight between two postures that are both already inside the AI environment whether they acknowledge it or not.

This is not the time for camps.

AI evolution is inevitable. The contractor reading this book does not need to choose a camp. The contractor reading this book needs to find the operators who have refused to participate in the camp-creating dynamic and who are doing the actual work of figuring out what serves contractors in the transition we are all in the middle of.

There is a coalition of those operators. I want to name them, because the contractor reader deserves to know who is leaning in to this work with the seriousness it requires, and because the trades industry needs to know that there is a leadership cohort that has refused to participate in the camp-fighting and is instead doing the operational work of building for the present and the future at the same time.

Crystal Williams — Lemon Seed Marketing

Crystal Williams is the CEO of Lemon Seed Marketing, and she has been one of the clearest voices in the industry on what good leadership looks like during the AI transition.

Crystal’s operating thesis is one I want to credit specifically because it has shaped how I think about this entire transition. Crystal believes we should be optimizing for the present and the future. That single framing is the most useful piece of plain-language guidance any contractor reader could take away from this chapter, because it cuts through the camp dynamic by refusing to participate in it. The contractor who is optimizing for the present is doing the SEO work that still drives traffic in 2026. The contractor who is optimizing for the future is building the AAO infrastructure that will drive traffic in 2028 and beyond. Crystal’s posture is that the contractor needs to do both, simultaneously, with the same commitment to operational discipline. That is the only honest answer to the transition we are in. The contractor who optimizes only for the present loses the future. The contractor who optimizes only for the future loses the present. The contractor who optimizes for both runs both systems concurrently for the next two to three years and emerges on the other side with the operational continuity that the camp-fighters will not have.

When I asked Crystal for a quote for this chapter, she sent back something better than a quote. She sent a letter. I am including it here in full, unedited, in her words — because nobody in this industry says this better.

AI Didn’t Replace Branding — It Made It Essential

By Crystal Williams, Co-Founder & Visionary, Lemon Seed Marketing

When artificial intelligence first became part of the public conversation, many business owners reacted with equal parts curiosity and fear. Every headline seemed to ask the same question:

“Will AI replace us?”

I don’t believe that was ever the right question.

The better question was, “How will AI change the way people find and trust us?”

After nearly two decades helping contractors build recognizable brands, I’ve learned one thing that AI has only reinforced: technology changes, but trust doesn’t.

We’ve watched marketing evolve from newspaper ads and phone books to websites, search engines, social media, review platforms, and now AI-driven search experiences. Every new platform promised to change everything. In reality, each one simply changed how consumers discovered businesses, not why they chose them.

People still buy from companies they trust.

The difference today is that AI has become the new front door.

Instead of scrolling through pages of search results, consumers increasingly ask AI a question:

“Who’s the best HVAC company near me?”

“Who can I trust to replace my roof?”

“What’s the most reputable plumber in my area?”

AI doesn’t invent those answers. It assembles them from the digital reputation businesses have built over years: websites, reviews, educational content, community involvement, media mentions, customer experiences, and brand consistency.

In many ways, AI has become the world’s fastest researcher.

That should encourage business owners, not scare them.

At Lemon Seed, we’ve always believed marketing wasn’t about chasing algorithms. It was about building a brand worthy of being recommended. AI simply rewards companies that have done that work well.

The businesses that will thrive in this next chapter aren’t necessarily the ones producing the most content. They’re the ones creating the clearest identity.

They know who they are. They consistently communicate what they believe. They educate instead of simply advertising. They show up in their communities. They earn five-star experiences instead of chasing five-star reviews.

Those are the signals AI recognizes because those are the signals people have always trusted.

The companies struggling with AI usually aren’t facing a technology problem, they’re facing a branding content problem.

A weak brand cannot be fixed with better prompts.

A strong brand becomes amplified by AI.

That’s why I don’t believe marketing professionals should compete against artificial intelligence. We should help businesses become the kind of organizations AI naturally recommends.

The future belongs to brands that are unmistakably human.

AI can generate content. It can summarize information. It can answer questions.

But it cannot replace authentic relationships, community involvement, company culture, genuine expertise, or the trust earned one customer at a time.

Those are still profoundly human.

As we move forward, I believe our responsibility isn’t simply to teach clients how to use AI. It’s to help them become so clear, credible, and consistent that whether the recommendation comes from a neighbor, a search engine, or an AI assistant, the answer remains the same.

Build a brand people trust.

The technology will continue to evolve.

Trust never goes out of style.

Every major shift in marketing has rewarded the businesses that invested in relationships over shortcuts. AI isn’t rewriting that rule, it’s proving it.

— Crystal Williams, CEO of Lemon Seed Marketing

I want to add one thing to Crystal’s letter, and it belongs in this chapter more than anywhere else in this book.

Crystal is one of the few people in this industry who never talked about me without talking to me. While others talked about what we were building without ever asking, she stayed curious. She got on calls with me and talked for hours. She asked questions instead of inventing answers. And then she decided to learn alongside me.

That is the posture this entire chapter is asking of you. It is also, not coincidentally, why her letter is in this book.

Crystal’s leadership matters not just because of what she believes but because of how she conducts herself in the industry conversations that the camp-creators have been polluting. She does not punch at competitors. She does not position her work against other agencies’ work. She does the work of building for what is actually happening and lets the work speak. That posture, modeled at the leader level, is what the rest of the industry should be looking for in their advisors and partners. The contractor whose current marketing partner is loud about which camp they are in should be asking why their partner is spending energy on camp-fighting instead of on the operational work that Crystal has been doing quietly and well.

Lynn Wise — Contractor in Charge

Lynn Wise is the CEO of Contractor in Charge, and she has been one of the trades industry’s most consistent voices on the operational integration of AI into contractor businesses.

What I want contractor readers to understand about Lynn is that her work is focused on the layer most contractor advisors are still ignoring — the back-office, operations-side integration of AI into contractor businesses themselves. Most of the AI conversation in the trades is about marketing-side AI. Lynn has been doing the operations-side work, building tools and providing the kind of guidance that helps contractors actually run their businesses with AI augmentation rather than just market themselves with it. That is harder, less visible, and substantially more important for the contractor whose actual business is the work of running a service operation, not the work of generating new leads. Lynn’s leadership is the kind that does not get the conference-keynote attention that the marketing-side leaders get, but the operational work she is doing is going to be cited as foundational by the contractor businesses that survive the next decade.

[QUOTE FROM LYNN WISE — TO BE PROVIDED]

Lynn has also refused the camp-fighting posture. She works with contractors regardless of which marketing agency they are using. She shares what she has learned with the broader industry rather than reserving it for her direct clients. She is operating in the GitHub-collaboration mode that this chapter opened with, even though she is not from a software-development background. That posture is what good leadership looks like in the transition, and Lynn has been modeling it for years.

Utku “Dave” Kaynar — OnePath AI

Utku “Dave” Kaynar is the CEO of OnePath AI, and his work is at the technical-infrastructure layer that most of the industry does not yet understand.

OnePath AI is building the agentic infrastructure that contractor businesses will eventually run on, whether through OnePath directly or through the agencies and platforms that integrate with it. Dave’s leadership is technical and operational rather than marketing-facing, which means his contributions are less visible to the contractor reader who has not yet started building AI infrastructure for their own business. The contractor who has started will already know who Dave is, because OnePath’s work shows up in the technical conversations about how contractor businesses are actually being augmented by AI in 2026. The contractor who has not yet started should know who Dave is because his work is going to be foundational to the next layer of contractor-industry technology, and the contractor who is paying attention to OnePath AI now is the contractor who will be operationally ahead of the contractor who discovers it in 2028.

“Most contractors meet AI for the first time as a lead that didn’t get called back. A homeowner fills out a form at nine at night, nobody answers until Tuesday, and the job is already gone to whoever picked up first. That’s the problem I started with. OnePath is an AI lead manager — it answers, it qualifies, it follows up in the contractor’s own voice, so the lead that used to die in the inbox turns into a booked job. But the lead manager is just the part the contractor can see. Underneath it we’re building the agentic infrastructure their whole business is going to run on, because in a few years ‘answer the phone’ and ‘run the company’ are going to be the same system.

I’m not building this so a contractor can fire his people. I’m building it so a thirty-person shop can compete with the private-equity roll-up that just bought every competitor in his county. The trades kept this country running long before anyone in my industry paid attention to them, and they deserve infrastructure built to make them stronger, not infrastructure built to extract from them. That’s the line I won’t cross. We document what we build, we publish the integrations, and we share the architecture — because if this only works for the contractors who can afford a technology team, we’ve failed. The whole point is that the guy in the truck gets the same firepower as the people trying to put him out of business.” — Utku “Dave” Kaynar, CEO, OnePath AI

Dave is also building inside the open-source-collaboration mode that this chapter is arguing for. OnePath’s technical contributions are made publicly. The integrations are documented. The architecture is shared. That posture, in a category where most operators are guarding their technical work as proprietary advantage, is what the trades industry needs more of. Dave is showing what it looks like.

Dave sent one more thing after his quote — a paragraph about me. I debated whether it belonged in a book I am writing. I am including it for one reason: the last sentence makes this chapter’s argument better than I made it.

“Jennifer is one of the true visionaries in this industry — someone who sees what’s coming before the rest of us do, and then builds it anyway. That second part is the rare one. Plenty of people can describe the future on a stage. Very few will restructure their own company, bet their reputation, and do the hard building required to actually get there. Jennifer does both, and she has been doing it for twenty years.

We come at this from different layers — she has spent two decades earning the trust of the contractor and the supply chain, and I come at it from the technical infrastructure underneath — but we have never once treated that as competition. She shares what she knows. She builds for the whole ecosystem, not just her own clients.

So when Jennifer writes that the contractor shouldn’t have to walk this road alone, I believe her — because that is exactly how she has shown up for the people building alongside her, including me.” — Utku “Dave” Kaynar

Paul Wiese — Trade Rated

Paul Wiese is the founder of Trade Rated, the company operating under the trademarked “Built By The Trades” tagline he holds. Trade Rated is a portfolio of nine apps designed specifically for the trades industry from an operator’s perspective. Paul is also the founder of Door Serv Pro, the operating company recently acquired by Guild Garage.

With more than three decades inside the trades, Paul’s background is rooted in real contractor operations, field service, scaling teams, customer experience, and operational systems. His leadership sits in the category of operationally credible AI advocacy — the kind of leadership that comes from someone who has actually lived the realities of running a trades business and understands where AI creates real operational value versus where it creates noise.

Unlike many voices entering the AI conversation from outside the industry, Paul approaches technology through the lens of execution, profitability, scalability, and customer experience inside real contractor environments. His work focuses on integrating AI into practical operational systems that contractors can actually use, deploy, and benefit from in the field.

Paul has consistently advocated for collaboration, shared learning, and open contribution across the trades community. His posture is not centered on gatekeeping information or creating division inside the industry, but on helping contractors understand and adapt to the technological shift already reshaping the market.

I want to disclose, before I share the words Paul put on the record for this book, the relationship architecture between Paul and me. The disclosure is the same one I made in Chapter Seven and I am restating it here so the reader has it in front of them at the moment Paul’s quote lands. Paul is the founder of Trade Rated, where I sit on the board and hold a small equity position alongside him. Paul and I provide the strategic insights that shape the company’s direction together. Paul is also the founder of Door Serv Pro, recently acquired by Guild Garage, and Door Serv Pro has been a CI Web Group client. The Built By The Trades tagline is Paul’s trademark. The relationship between us is not the relationship between an author and an independent industry voice. It is the relationship between a fellow board member, a long-standing client, a co-strategist, and a coalition voice. The book is more honest with that disclosure on the page than without it. The quote that follows is what Paul put on the record after the disclosure was established between us. He knew it was for the book. He knew the relationship architecture would be visible. He sent it anyway.

“I do not believe AI replaces the trades. I believe AI exposes the operators who never really understood their business in the first place. The contractors who win this next era will not be the ones chasing every shiny tool. They will be the ones who know their numbers, know their people, protect their customers, and use AI to tighten the operation instead of pretending technology can fix weak leadership. The trades do not need more noise. They need operators who have lived the work, built the systems, and are willing to share what actually works."

— Paul Wiese, Founder, Trade Rated

Darren Dixon — My Happy Home and Fixify

Darren Dixon is the CEO of My Happy Home and Fixify, and he has been building at the consumer-experience layer of the trades industry while most of the industry has been focused elsewhere.

Darren’s work is on the consumer-side of the contractor-customer relationship — the layer where homeowners actually decide which contractor to hire, what to expect from the service experience, and how to evaluate the work after it is done. That layer is the one most directly affected by the AI-mediated consumer behaviors that the rest of this book has been describing. Darren has been building the consumer-facing infrastructure that helps homeowners navigate the trades industry, and his work has been increasingly integrated with the AI tools that homeowners are using to make decisions. The contractor who is paying attention to Darren’s work is the contractor who will see the consumer-side shifts coming before they hit their business. The contractor who is not paying attention will be surprised by changes that Darren has been writing and speaking about for years.

[QUOTE FROM DARREN DIXON — TO BE PROVIDED]

Darren’s leadership posture, like the others in this coalition, has been collaborative rather than competitive. He has refused to position his work against other operators in the same space. He shares what he has learned with the broader industry. He builds with the assumption that the contractor wins when the entire ecosystem improves, not when one operator hoards advantage. That posture is what the trades industry needs more of.

Five leaders. One coalition.

Crystal Williams. Lynn Wise. Utku Kaynar. Paul Wiese. Darren Dixon. Each of them is doing different work in different parts of the trades-industry value chain. Crystal at the marketing-leadership layer with the *optimize for the present and the future* operating thesis. Lynn at the operations-and-back-office layer. Dave at the technical-infrastructure layer. Paul at the operator-perspective layer with three decades of trades experience grounding his AI work. Darren at the consumer-experience layer. Together they form the kind of coalition the trades industry should be looking to as the leadership cohort during this transition. None of them are perfect. None of them have all the answers. All of them are doing the actual work of figuring out what serves contractors in an environment that is reorganizing faster than anybody fully understands. That is what good leadership looks like during a transition.

There are other operators who belong in this coalition who I have not named here. There are operators whose work I do not yet know well enough to credit by name and who deserve to be in the next edition of this book once I have studied their contributions with the seriousness they deserve. The coalition is open. The work the coalition is doing is the work of the next decade. The contractor reader who is currently with an advisor or a marketing partner who has been participating in the camp-fighting dynamic should look at the operators named in this chapter, evaluate whether their current advisor is operating in the same posture, and consider whether the difference between the camp-fighter and the coalition member is a difference that is going to matter for their business over the next three years.

AI evolution is inevitable. The contractor who is fighting it is fighting reality. The contractor who is leaning in agnostically is making a better choice than the fighter, because at least the agnostic is open to learning. The contractor who is leaning in alongside operators like the ones named in this coalition is making the best choice available. The differences will compound.

Now let me give you the map of what this transition actually looks like, because the leaders named in this chapter are operating inside an AI environment that the next chapter is going to describe in detail. The coalition tells you who to watch. The map tells you what they are watching.