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This domain used to be a photography website. For a long time that was accurate, because photography was the whole business. It is not the whole business anymore, so the site had to change.

Here is what it is now.

What this is

This is where I keep the record of what I have built and what I am building. Three companies, all pointed at the same problem from different angles, plus whatever I work out along the way and think is worth writing down.

If you landed here after a call with me, or a post, or somebody passed my name along, this is the page that tells you whether I am worth your time. The about page has the long version. The companies page has what each business actually does and what it costs.

What I am actually building

I spent eighteen years as a headshot photographer. I started in 2007 because I needed a headshot for an acting job and could not find anyone who would take one that looked like me. Over seventeen years in Chicago that turned into one of the top ten rated headshot studios in the United States, around fifteen thousand professionals photographed, and three million images.

Somewhere in the middle of that I noticed the thing that has driven everything since.

The studio was not winning because I was the best photographer in Chicago. There were photographers in that city who could out-shoot me. The studio was winning because when someone searched for a headshot, we came up, and when they read the reviews, they believed us. Being easy to find and easy to trust beat being marginally better at the craft, every single time, and it was not close.

That is a slightly deflating thing to learn when you have spent a decade on the craft. It is also the most useful thing I know.

So now I build companies that do that for other people. Spearleaf does the findable half. The Reputation does the trustworthy half. JA Headshots still does the original thing, because a photograph is just the version of that problem that happens on a face.

What I will write about here

Mostly the mechanics, and mostly the unglamorous parts.

What actually moves a local ranking, as opposed to what gets sold as moving one. What happens when an AI model starts answering the question your customers used to type into a search box. What a review is actually worth, and what it costs you when the wrong one sticks. What eighteen years of photographing nervous people taught me about why most businesses present themselves badly.

I will try to write about things that happened rather than things that sound good. When something did not work I would rather say so, because the posts I have learned the most from were the ones where somebody admitted the expensive mistake.

What this is not

It is not a sales page. If you want to hire one of the companies, each has its own site and its own team, and those are better places to do it than here.

This is just the place where the person behind them is on the record.

Thanks for reading. There will be more.