For the past several months, my website said I was an AI consultant. It had all the right buzzwords: "AI Strategy & Roadmapping," "Workflow Automation," "Navigate the Future of Business with AI." It looked professional. It was well-built. And every time I looked at it, something felt off.
The site was a landing page. It wasn't a brand. It said "consultant," but I'm not a consultant. I'm a builder. And the gap between what my website said and what I actually spend my days doing had been growing for a while.
This week, I finally did something about it.
The Rules Changed and I Didn't Notice
I'd been chewing on this for months. I knew in my gut that consulting was dying, that major firms would fall fast as AI commoditizes the kind of advice that used to require a $300/hour engagement. I thought as a one-person shop, I could still carve out space helping small businesses. But here's what I missed: consultancy isn't what small businesses want or need. They want problem solvers. They want builders.
Then I listened to Daniel Priestley on Diary of a CEO, and he put language to the thing I'd been feeling. The standalone consulting model is a red ocean. Every freelancer with AI tools can spin up a website and call themselves a strategist. Competing on "AI consulting for small businesses" is a losing game, not because the work isn't valuable, but because there's nothing defensible about it.
The insight that hit hardest: I was playing a game with rules that used to exist but don't anymore. SEO optimization, buzzword-heavy service pages, "schedule a consultation" CTAs, all of it designed for a world where information asymmetry was the business model. That world is gone. AI leveled it.
What's left? Lived experience. Real projects. Things you've actually built and shipped. The stuff AI can't fake.
What I Walked Away From
The old site wasn't bad. It just wasn't me.
It had me playing a role, the professional consultant who speaks in frameworks and deliverables. But I'm not that guy. I'm not a salesman. I build things and I keep them running well. Selling is hard for me, and the old positioning put me squarely in a sales posture I never wanted.
I was optimizing for SEO keywords nobody in my actual niche was searching for. Writing service descriptions for offerings that didn't match what I was spending my time on. The site said "AI Strategy & Roadmapping" while I was heads-down building a custom league management platform for youth flag football. The disconnect was absurd.
So I deleted it. The services page, the consulting positioning, the enterprise language, the "schedule a consultation" buttons. All of it. Gone.
It felt like clearing out a garage full of someone else's stuff.
What I Built Instead
The new ShirePath is organized around three ideas:
Studio: the products. Software and platforms I've built and shipped. League-OS for youth flag football. Biblical Battle Plans for gamified Bible reading. Christmas Story Card for AI-powered personalized cards with voice narration. Real products, used by real people.
Workshop: the experiments. What I'm tinkering with, building in the open, and learning from. This includes the projects that didn't make it, like Summit Habit Tracker, which taught me that solving your own problem is necessary but not sufficient. The failures are on display alongside the wins, because that's how building actually works.
Field: the proving ground. Real businesses I operate, where the software gets stress-tested by 1,500 families, real seasons, and real stakes. This is where the ideas meet reality.
Claude actually proposed this three-part framing during our brainstorming session, and it immediately clicked. It gave me a way to show the full picture, not just what shipped, but what I'm building and where it all gets tested. No pitch deck. No discovery call. Just: here's the work.
How It Got Built
The rebrand was a multi-day process. Most of the time went into chewing through ideas, figuring out what ShirePath actually is when you strip away the consultant costume. I wrote a creative brief and a context document capturing the thinking, then handed it all to Claude Code.
The implementation commit tells the story: 49 files changed. 2,061 lines added. 1,634 lines removed. New pages for Studio, Workshop, and Field. Old services and consulting pages deleted. Navigation restructured. New components for the portfolio. The whole site rebuilt around showing the work instead of selling a service.
Claude Code handled the heavy lifting, taking the creative brief and translating it into a complete site overhaul. New page layouts, component architecture, portfolio data restructuring, OpenGraph images, sitemap updates. The kind of coordinated, multi-file refactor that would normally take days of careful work, done in a focused session with AI as the implementation partner.
The result feels right. Warm tan and dark green instead of cold tech blue. A craftsman's workshop, not a SaaS landing page. The portfolio front and center. An About page that sounds like a human being, not a corporate template.
The Real Shift
This rebrand isn't cosmetic. It's a statement about what I think matters now.
The old playbook said: position yourself as an expert, optimize for search engines, write content that ranks, convert visitors into leads. And that playbook worked in a world where information was scarce and access to expertise was expensive.
That world doesn't exist anymore. AI can write the SEO content. AI can generate the service descriptions. AI can build the landing page. What AI can't do is run a youth sports league for three years and then build the platform to manage it because nothing else fit. It can't hit an architectural wall at 100 users, tear the whole thing down, and rebuild it properly. It can't wake up at 5am for F3 workouts and then spend the evening wiring a Whoop to a glucose monitor because the curiosity won't leave you alone.
The moat isn't information anymore. The moat is the building. The lived experience. The portfolio of things you've actually made and shipped and learned from.
That's what ShirePath is now. Not "hire me to consult." Just: look at what I build.
What's Next
I'm still gathering feedback on the new site. This post is part of the rollout, the first entry in what I'm treating as an honest build log. What shipped, what broke, what I learned, what's next.
If you're a builder stuck behind a consultant's website, wondering why it doesn't feel right, it's probably because it isn't right. The rules changed. You don't have to play the old game anymore.
Build the thing. Show the work. Let that be the pitch.
Relentlessly curious. Unreasonably willing to build.
