Who is Brian Gibbs?
Small business decisions 25 years.
Every new thing that hit the internet brought the same call. Not 'this is amazing' or 'we should try this.' It was always 'what does this mean for my business?' I started building websites in 1998, before most small businesses even had a domain name. Search engine optimization came next, then paid advertising. Twenty-five years later, the technology keeps changing but the question remains the same.
Why I do this
December 23rd, 2022 changed everything.
Southwest canceled flights across the country that day. What started as a routine layover in the Centurion Lounge in Las Vegas turned into a scramble for one of the last seats back to San Antonio. Back home that night with nowhere to be, YouTube served up something called ChatGPT. It had been out less than three weeks and already had hundreds of hours of video. Eighty hours of watching later, spread across the next few days, one thing was certain: nothing in twenty-five years of watching the internet reshape small businesses had ever moved like this. Every owner was about to face the biggest decision of their business. Most of them didn't even know it yet.
What I do
Not strategy decks. Decisions.
My dad ran a roofing company for thirty years. He knew his craft cold, knew his customers by name, and made every decision himself because nobody else was going to. I watched that my whole life, and that's the owner I work with now.
The difference is, my dad never had to decide whether to trust a machine with his customer relationships, his pricing, or his reputation. You do. And most of the people offering to help you with that decision are selling you the machine.
I'm not. You come in with a problem you can't get your arms around, and we sit down and figure out what's actually at risk. I ask the questions nobody on your team is asking, and then I tell you what to do, what to skip, and why. You leave with a decision you can defend and a clear path to act on it, and then you go run your business.
If AI doesn't belong somewhere in your business, I'll say so. I'd rather give you the honest answer than the easy one.
A clear decision beats a perfect one that comes too late, and knowing what to ignore is just as valuable as knowing what to do.
You work with me directly from start to finish, and I stand behind every call we make together.
The decision has to hold up when your team challenges it, when the market shifts, and when you look back on it a year from now.
Why it matters
The decision is already being made.
Someone on your team is using an AI tool you don't know about, right now. They're not trying to be sneaky. They're just trying to get through their day. But every time they paste customer data into a chatbot or let a tool draft a message to a client, they're making a decision about your business that you never approved. By the time you find out, the decision is already baked in. It's not that owners lack AI tools. It's that nobody is helping them figure out which decisions the tools should be making and which ones they absolutely should not.
Principles
How I think.
01
The decision is the product.
I don't leave until you know exactly what to do next.
02
I say what to ignore.
Anything that doesn't move the decision gets cut.
03
Small surface, real consequences.
I narrow the scope until the decision is unmistakable.
04
Defensible beats clever.
If it won't hold up when your team challenges it, it's not the right call.
"The right decision simplifies
everything that follows."
— Brian Gibbs
Who I work with
People running real businesses.
Not short on tools. Short on clarity.
Stuck between too many options, not too little information.
Want certainty so they can scale.
Willing to eliminate more than they add.
If you don't make the call, the business makes it for you.
Before you spend on tools, lock the decision.
If this is how you think too, let's talk.