Most AI consultants pitching local business are selling chatbots or theoretical AI, with nothing behind it. Here's what I've actually built and run — including the parts that didn't work.
Both of these get judged by the same rule I learned in 1981, before AI existed: garbage in, garbage out. What that means in practice →
A real local IT repair and support business — the one I run alongside OptimisedLead, in public, including the parts that didn't work.
Started as buying old iMacs and MacBooks, refurbishing them, and reselling — moderate success, not a fortune. Pivoted to a repair-and-OS-update service when that made more sense than chasing resale margins.
What didn't work: magazine ads, leaflets, Google ads, Facebook ads — all tried, all failed to convert. SEO is largely dead now too, since local traffic has shifted to Facebook and YouTube reels. That's not a footnote — it's the actual, expensive lesson.
What's working, still early: organic short-form video. Underway, unproven at scale, but the first channel that's shown real signs of life after everything else failed.
Why this matters to you: every month, a plain review goes up — what happened, what moved, what didn't — so you can watch the actual struggle to get traffic, not a highlight reel. If you run a local business, this is probably closer to your own experience than anything a polished agency will show you.
"Marcus is very knowledgable in this area and he has helped me no end... I don't know how I would have resolved all my tech issues with[out him]." — Paul Maxwell
"My iMac has been completely transformed by Marcus — has literally saved me from having to buy a whole new device. I would most definitely recommend." — Aidan Phillips
5.0 rating on Google, real client reviews — not curated testimonials.
A client needed multiple wholesale suppliers connected to their retailers — orders, stock, couriers, payments, the lot. A real software product, built with heavy AI assistance, shipped, and sold to a real buyer, who's onboarding now.
The real problem: suppliers and retailers in this world are notoriously tech-averse. Ask them to upload a spreadsheet or fill in an account form, and they'll go straight back to phone, pen, and paper. So the design had to remove friction, not add features.
Accounts created automatically. Auto-login links sent out — no password to forget. The retailer view kept dead simple. The supplier view even simpler. All the complexity — data insights, order tracking, courier integration, the ledger — lives in the admin view, out of the way of the people who just need to place an order.
Courier tracking plugged straight in. Gap analysis catches missing orders before they turn into a phone call. Full ledger and communications trail, so nothing falls through the cracks.
The platform's since been sold. Buyer's onboarding now.
Kept deliberately outcome-level — no product name, no code, no architecture — by agreement with the buyer. What's shareable: the discipline behind it (real documentation throughout, iterative AI-assisted development, a genuine sale at the end) and the thinking behind the design (friction-removal for tech-averse users, complexity pushed into the admin layer, everyone else gets simplicity).
Not that I'm the finished expert with all the answers. That I've actually built real things, with real constraints, for real people who don't want to think about technology — which is exactly the audience OptimisedLead is built for.