"I've worked every job inside a real business. Counter, dispatch, accounting, scheduling, hiring, complaints, returns, P&L reviews — and every one of them taught me something specific about where businesses bleed time and money."
I started behind a rental counter at Budget Rent a Car on Martha's Vineyard in 2013. Customer service from day one — and the worst day at a rental counter is also the best teacher. You learn what people actually want, what makes them angry, what wins them back.
Promoted through every job after that. Dispatch. Scheduling drivers, managing the fleet rotation, watching reservations come in and go out. Then accounting and reporting — running daily and monthly P&L reports, reconciling deposits, managing vendor invoices, working with the corporate office on financial closing.
Eventually general manager. Now responsible for everything: hiring 15 staff at peak season, scheduling them around split shifts, vendor management across 8+ partners, customer escalations, fleet ordering decisions, end-of-season sell-offs, insurance claims, you name it.
What I noticed running all of it: the same problems show up at every department. Too much manual work. Too many systems that don't talk to each other. Critical knowledge trapped in 3 people's heads. Endless time wasted answering the same questions over and over.
Then in 2017, I co-opened Mikado Asian Bistro on Martha's Vineyard. Different industry, completely different headaches — inventory, payroll, supplier coordination, seasonal staffing, food cost percentages, all the unglamorous restaurant ops. We're still open eight years later. And just like Budget, the same backend chaos showed up: manual data entry, systems that didn't talk, tribal knowledge in too few heads. We automated the worst of it. ViddAI runs Mikado's backend today.
That's the world I built ViddAI to fix.