Hi, I'm Nick Dennis
I'm a builder and consultant from Michigan, and I help small businesses simplify how they run. It took a strange road to get here. The strange road is most of what makes me good at this.
As a kid I wanted to be an inventor, or a musician, or a business owner: somebody who used their mind to solve problems and build things. I didn't know the word for it yet, but I wanted to be an entrepreneur. So I spent my time on business schemes, inventions, and half-finished software. A few of them even worked. Most of them didn't.
Instead, I spent about ten years as a professional poker player. Not quite the world-changing career I'd dreamed about, but for a competitive twenty-year-old it was pretty sweet. I set my own hours, answered to no one, and got to live in Costa Rica and Montreal along the way.
It turned out poker had given me something more valuable than a bankroll: it taught me how to learn. Years of studying numbers, reviewing my own decisions, and correcting mistakes made picking up new skills feel natural. Since then I've pointed that at web development, programming, marketing, piano and guitar, vegetable gardening, cooking, building drones (I went back to college for that one), and more things than I can list. Every project I take on asks me to learn something new. That's my favorite part of the job.
I still play a little, and two habits from those years run everything I do.
Judge the decision, not the result. In poker you can do everything right and still lose the hand. If you only look at outcomes, you learn the wrong lessons. I evaluate work by the quality of the thinking behind it.
Small edges compound. Nobody wins big on one hand. You win by making slightly better decisions than everyone else, thousands of times. Businesses improve the same way.
My job isn't to come in and start over. It's to make what's already working run better, and to leave you with systems your team actually understands.
Big ideas. Small steps.
Strategy comes first and informs every decision after it. With the end goal clear, each next step gets easy to find.
Trust and transparency.
I extend both first, to you and your team, and I expect the same back. People do their best work when nobody is guarding their turf.
Ask the obvious questions.
On purpose. The simple question is usually the one that finds the step nobody has looked at in five years.
Constraints are useful.
Small teams, busy weeks, tools that have to stay simple. These force clear thinking. Most of my best work exists because the complicated version wasn’t an option.
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Interested to see if I can help?
The next step is a free consultation call. No pitch, no pressure. We'll talk about how your business runs and whether I can help. If I can't, I'll tell you that too.