Hello, world!

By Garrett, 03 Mar 2025

It’s been a while since I sat behind the wheel of a fresh new website.

The last first blog post I wrote was in 2014 shortly after starting Good Work, the web development agency that I started and ran for over 10 years. Before that was Erskine Design and before that was a web design company I started in college. If you add it all together I’ve spent 18 long years in digital client services.

With my last business, Good Work, I followed the classic maker-to-business-owner trajectory—doing what I loved (making things), then gradually delegating my work to others until, before I knew it, I wasn’t making anything at all!

I spent most of 2024 thinking through my purpose and what I should do next. I considered everything from operations consulting for digital service businesses to riding the silver tsunami and purchasing 20-30 year old blue collar businesses that I could optimize with modern practices and tools. Every few months I came to my wife with a new idea for our future, and she somehow patiently cheered on each one of them. I got pretty far into a few ideas before realizing that I couldn’t see myself doing any of it! Back to the drawing board…

One day I was speaking to Phil about this conundrum and through conversation, I remembered an old known that I had lost sight of: I’m a lifetime maker, thinker, problem-solver, innovator, and whatever I do it needs to live at the intersection of these things.

After about five seconds of back and forth it became incredibly clear that the next step was to start the last business I’ll ever work at; a little consulting/innovation studio called Better than good.

---

Looking back, the best moments of my career were when I was deep in the details: dissecting how things work, solving operational problems, and designing solutions that make businesses look and work better. And that’s what Better than good is all about—helping service businesses optimize and stand out through jargon-free business frameworks and meaningful design and innovation.

What I bring isn’t MBA theory—it’s 18 years of real-world problem-solving, trial and error and hands-on experience building and optimizing service businesses from the ground up.

Over the next six months I’ll be tackling projects that I’ve had in the back of my head for entirely too long, while developing this optimization framework that I can eventually share with other founders facing the same challenges I’ve worked through myself.