About

The company

For over six years, I had the privilege of running McGlaun Consulting, which eventually became Identity Solutions. I loved my team. We had someone who handled the back office, someone who ran our services, and many others who kept the hundred daily fires from reaching my inbox. Then we shut it down, and my wife and I packed up and moved to Sweden.

The fall

Shutting down Identity Solutions felt like a death in the family, and in some ways it was. The company wasn't just a business. It was my identity, and my whole adult life had been pointed at it. When it was gone, I genuinely didn't know who I was without it.

The embarrassment was real. I had people working for me who were my closest friends, people who trusted me with their livelihoods, and when it ended I felt like I'd let every one of them down. Myself included.

I took more time off than I planned, then eventually went back to work as an employee.

Going from running the show to playing one instrument is its own kind of hard, and nobody talks about it, but I felt it every day. You go from orchestrating everything to focusing on one thing, and you spend the rest of your time doing the operational stuff that used to just get done, because now you're the one doing it.

And it wasn't just work. When you move countries, everything resets at once.

I'm an acquired taste, and I know it. I push hard, move fast, and I usually think I have the right answer. That's the edge that makes me effective and occasionally difficult. Right or wrong, I felt like what I was doing was beneath me. Not the work itself. The ceiling. I know what I'm capable of, and I found that the politics, the pace, the cultural gaps of being an American building a career in Sweden make little space for someone wired the way I'm wired. When you're rebuilding from zero in a new country, with no network, in a culture that moves at its own tempo, even a familiar game has a different rulebook. You know what you can do, but finding somewhere to do it is another problem entirely.

Only recently have I started feeling like myself again.

The catalyst

Part of that recovery was facing a former foe.

We decided to shift Identity Solutions from a pure services organization to something that could generate its own pipeline. To do that seriously, we needed to rebrand, build partner relationships with the major identity vendors, and figure out inbound marketing from scratch. I had no idea how to do any of it. We hired a HubSpot partner and worked through the whole thing: buyer personas, content calendars, SEO, site copy. We were spending $20,000 a month to figure out marketing while I was learning it in real time.

Nine months in, COVID hit. Contracts got pulled, the committed pipeline we were counting on evaporated, and the math stopped working. I made the call.

When I found AI, I kept coming back to all of it: the money we spent on marketing, the learning curve, the dependency on someone else to build something I didn't understand. The question wasn't "should I hire an agency again." It was: could I build this myself? Would it actually be possible to get similar results without the $20K a month?

So I tried. I started building an AI-powered content platform, and there was one problem: I've never written code in my life. The only scripting I'd ever done was PowerShell, and I had never been a developer. But I could tell AI what I wanted, and I was learning to make it listen.

The mess

That was a year ago, and in that time I've rebuilt the same system three times, spent months refactoring code that AI wrote wrong, and learned the hard way that AI without guardrails will do whatever it wants, and most of what it wants is wrong.

I had to figure out how to put checks in place so AI wouldn't blow up its own work, how to build skills that compound instead of starting from scratch every session, how to give it memory, constraints, feedback loops. How to manage it like a team instead of using it like a chatbot.

It broke constantly, and it still breaks. But somewhere in all that failing it started to work, and I started shipping things a person without a team shouldn't be able to ship.

The content platform was where I started the journey. Once I understood how to manage AI like a team, I started applying it to everything: client work, daily operations, problems that had been sitting on the back burner for years. What started as one project became a way of working. I had a team again. Not people, but something that functions like one. I could put my clarinet back in its case, step back onto the podium, and when I raised my baton, we were making music again.

People started asking how. That's what this is.

The reality

Most AI content is a sanitized demo. Someone built something that looks impressive in a five-minute video and they're sharing it before it falls apart. Nobody's showing you whether it scales, whether they're still using it six months later, or what they had to rebuild three times to get it working.

This is the other side of that. What it actually looks like to build something real with AI: the process, the failures, the parts that get thrown out, and the stuff that actually compounds over time.

I'm a guy who put his instrument down, lost years trying to find the podium again, and rebuilt his whole orchestra with AI. This site is where I write about what that actually looks like.

You don't learn from your wins. You get better at what not to do.

Follow the journey