A founder working late nights built an automated client health dashboard by wiring API pulls from affiliate platforms. Lacking engineering skills, the founder used Claude Code and self-taught coding to create tools, but the effort reduced overall performance as CEO. The founder realized the next level of AI development required technical experience and bandwidth beyond what one person could sustain. Trying to cover all AI needs became a full-time responsibility that did not fit the founder’s role. The solution was to invest in an AI engineer. The founder also emphasized planning ahead for where the industry is going and noted that fast growth requires operations to scale with revenue and teams to match that pace.
"I had taught myself Claude Code and spent months coding late into the night, building tools from the inside out because I genuinely believed, and still do, that you have to understand something yourself before you can lead others through it. I built some things I was proud of, and after countless late nights, I started to notice that my AI enthusiasm was affecting my overall performance as a founder and CEO of two agencies, and pulling me away from the parts of the business only I could lead."
"I had to be honest with myself: I didn't have the technical experience or the bandwidth to take our AI buildout to the next level on my own. The tools I wanted to create were more sophisticated than what one founder, however determined, could sustainably produce. Sitting there, I realized that trying to be everything Dreamday and Quality Media needed from an AI standpoint was going to be a full-time job, and one that wasn't mine."
"That was the moment I knew we needed to invest in an AI engineer. If you're a founder running a service business and you've been staying up late working on projects you're not quite equipped to build, you're probably in the same spot I was."
"Part of my job is to always be looking years ahead, not just at where the industry is today, but where it's going. Dreamday has been recognized by Fast Company as one of the most innovative companies in PR and advertising, and both Dreamday and Quality Media were named to Adweek's Fastest Growing Agencies list. Fast-growing means something specific: your operations have to scale as fast as your revenue, your team has to be as good a"
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