There was a Unix mainframe humming in the back room of my father and grandfather's office.
Everyone walked past it.
I went right up to it.
I was a teenager interning for the family business when I first felt the pull. Most people treat technology like infrastructure. Something that runs in the background. Something IT handles.
I've never been able to do that.
My first real contribution to the business wasn't a sale. It wasn't a shipment. It was pulling my father and grandfather off fax machines and onto AOL. Helping them buy their first PCs. Nobody asked me to. I just couldn't help myself.
That turned into more. A local area network. A file server. An email server. All while going to night school for networking and web development. Built our first website. Launched our first Shopify store. Managed our warehouse before we moved to a 3PL. Built my own PCs for fun.
Then came the implementations. ERP. EDI. PLM. All tools to help run the business and I was the project manager for all. But what I was really doing was designing systems.
I caught the bug early and never lost it. The tools may have changed beyond recognition. That obsession never did.
In 2022, something shifted.
I started experimenting with AI. Not the demos. Not the hype cycle. The actual question: can this change how I operate a business?
By early 2026, I was building my first AI agents and designing agentic workflows from scratch.
It felt like 1998 again. Back when I was wiring LANs in my family's office.
For the first time, the three things that moved me the most were all converging. Entrepreneurship, technology, and systems all pulling in the same direction. I wasn't just integrating other people's software anymore. I was building my own.
Here's what I kept running into.
The conversation about AI and operations is dominated by three voices: engineers writing for engineers, marketers selling automations, and consultants selling fear. I couldn't find the person actually running the business. Where is that person that handles sourcing, manages vendor relationships across 12 time zones, navigates chargebacks and compliance, while keeping the supply chain humming at optimal performance?
There is the void.
I know what it looks like when a freight invoice comes back 20% higher than the quote with no explanation. When you're chasing six vendors on the same RFQ and the ship date is in three weeks. When a container disappears between your freight forwarder and your 3PL and nobody has a straight answer.
I know what it feels like to have problems like that persist. Nobody around with the operational context to solve them.
That's what changed.
Operator Mindset is a weekly newsletter about running operations in the age of AI. Not theory. Not hype. What AI actually does. What it doesn't. For the kind of business where margin lives in the details.
Written by someone who has been on the operator side of every technology wave for the past 25 years. Who is, right now, in the middle of the same transformation you're probably staring at.
I'm not a guru. I'm an operator who started tinkering as a kid and never stopped.
Every Saturday. One issue. One idea. Something you can actually use.
See you next week.
Ricky
P.S. Next issue: why your company needs an agent org chart and what it looks like in practice.
Where did your obsession start? Hit reply. I read every email.
“You gotta get your mind right.”