I co-own a real estate company. I also build AI tools for operators under Viciens — MAXFORCE, Peregrin, and Luminade.
Operator · Builder · Founder of Viciens
What were you doing when you were 20?
I started a landscape maintenance company called Green Horizon Landscaping. I was good at the work — door-knocking, sales, execution. I was bad at the math underneath.
I took loans out for the mowers, the revenue was real, and the debt payments ate it. Profitable on paper, broke in the bank account. That’s the lesson I still use: the top line is the easy part.
What finally made this feel possible?
My brother David. We’d both spent a few years educating ourselves — podcasts, books, seminars — and got into alignment on what the business model could actually be. In early 2024, David kicked off the first flip. That’s when it stopped being theoretical.
Not a tool, not a market shift. A partner I trusted who’d done the same homework, and a first deal that actually closed. One Palmetto exists because of that. Everything else I’m building exists because One Palmetto gave me the cash-flow base and the daily operational context AI tools actually need.
How does someone who runs a real estate company end up building AI software?
I spent 14 years trying to build businesses before One Palmetto and got most of it wrong. Operations is where I kept getting wrong — the cost structure underneath the revenue, the part that gets glossed over in the build-in-public posts.
One Palmetto forced me to learn that side in real time. The tools I needed to run it didn’t exist in a form built for someone like me. So I started building them. Then I noticed every other small operator I knew had the same gap. That’s what Viciens is.
What are you actually building?
Three things, one thesis: operators don’t need AI products built by engineers for engineers. They need AI products built by someone who runs the kind of business they run.
MAXFORCE — a personal operating system that pulls a scattered day onto one surface. I built it for me first, then realized the same problem hits anyone juggling multiple apps to run their life. I’m writing about it on Substack as it develops.
Peregrin — an AI content production pipeline for SMB operations teams. The work of a content studio without the headcount. I built it first because One Palmetto needed it and nothing on the market worked the way an operator-led team actually works.
Luminade — productized website and service plan for small businesses. The presence of a larger company on a small-business cadence. It’s what I’d sell to every operator I know who shouldn’t have to think about either.
What’s broken in the AI-for-operators space that nobody says out loud?
Everyone’s building one-off apps. The AI-for-operators space is a field of point solutions that each do one thing well and none of them talk to each other. If you’re a CEO who also tracks fitness and manages a tech stack, you’ve got five to ten apps with notifications going off all day — and that’s before personal email and calendar reminders pile on top. There’s no central surface. Nothing fluid. Nothing intuitive enough that a real operator running real days would actually adopt it.
The discourse pretends this is fine because the apps are individually impressive. They’re not. An operator’s day isn’t five vertical workflows. It’s one continuous one. The product that wins this space is the one that gets that.
You’re not a developer. Does that matter?
I build with AI tools because I run the kind of business that needs them. I’m not the engineer in the room — I’m the operator who knows what’s worth building. That’s the credential.
In 2018 that sentence would’ve been a hedge. In 2026 it’s a position. The market moved.
What does the AI-for-operators space get wrong that you’ve stopped arguing about?
That you can iterate your way to a real product. You can’t. The space keeps shipping incremental improvements on the same broken patterns — a slightly better Notion clone, a slightly better Calendly, a slightly cleaner task manager. The wheel keeps getting reinvented, worse each time.
MAXFORCE started because I’d lived inside that frustration. I took the weaknesses I kept hitting in five different programs and just built one thing that did what all of them were failing at. Then I realized this isn’t a CEO problem — it’s a human-running-a-life problem. The everyday person has the same five-app stack as the entrepreneur. They just don’t articulate it that way.
The work is the argument now. I don’t argue about it.
What have you learned that you wish you’d known at 20?
The economics. I was good at the work and bad at the books. The Profit First method didn’t exist yet, or wasn’t on my radar, and I’d never had a mentor explain that revenue isn’t a business — profit is. Looking back, the gap wasn’t intelligence or effort. It was access to someone who’d read a P&L for a living and could’ve translated my Green Horizon spreadsheet into a real diagnosis.
What I’d tell 20-year-old me: get the financial structure right before you scale the operation. Find someone who can read a P&L and won’t lie to you. Then go build whatever you want.