From Freelancer to 2x Founder

The CFO of a security company called me on a Tuesday. I picked up.

“Wait. You’re the CFO. Why are you calling me?”

He needed a deck. He needed a deck to close a deal that week and his team couldn’t get him one fast enough. So he called the freelance photographer who had also, in the past three months, been quietly building decks and one-pagers for half of his lateral network. He said the words out loud: I need a deck, I need it now, I think you do this.

That call is when I knew Plumwheel was a company. Not a product. A company. Something a CFO would call on a Tuesday because his actual problem was that the team that should have been doing this had been doing it the old way, and the old way couldn’t ship in two days.

The thing I didn’t notice until later is that the whole run had been the same job. Walk into a room. Read what is actually happening. Make something fast that lets the room move forward. Hand it off and leave. That is the entire skill.

The gap that became Plumwheel

Plumwheel started when I realized two clients in a row had described the same problem. They had a great team. Their team knew the company. Their team could not write the marketing fast enough to keep up with what the company was actually doing. Every month, the gap got worse. By the time the marketing finally went out, the company had moved on. The brand was always two months behind the room.

I built a way to close that gap. Record a real conversation with the leadership team. Treat the conversation as the source. Turn the conversation into the marketing. Send the marketing back through the same team for sign-off, fast. The voice is theirs because they actually said it. The cadence is mine because I run the production.

That is Plumwheel. We don’t advise on AI transformation. We build it. Most of the work the AI does is invisible to the client because the client’s job is to be the company, not the system. Our job is the system.

RAGnos Labs

RAGnos Labs came later, and it came from the same instinct that turned my freelance work into a company. I had been wiring up the system that runs Plumwheel. The system became its own thing. Other agencies and small teams started asking how it worked. I realized I had built infrastructure for one company that wanted to become infrastructure for many. I founded RAGnos Labs to be the place that ships the agentic harness. It is the second company because it is a different problem. Plumwheel sells a relationship. RAGnos sells a build. The conservatory-to-content-engine version of this story, the one that starts in acting class and ends in an agentic production system, is over here.

What twenty years of freelance taught me

The reason I could go from freelance to two companies in a year and a half is not that I am unusually fast. It is that I had spent twenty years learning how to walk into a room I didn’t make and figure out what it actually needed. Founding two companies has been the same skill, in a bigger room, with a longer week.

The thing I would tell someone who is six months in on the same path is this: the freelance work is the company. You are already running it. The only question is whether you let yourself name it.

Cheers.