I was 14 years old, living in Tucson, Arizona. My parents had just divorced. I got my first job with a neighbor named Albert who owned the local Mexican restaurant chain, and the first Cricket Wireless distributor in Arizona.

A successful serial entrepreneur and family man who always said he just "sold burritos and some phones."

First day of work, I walked out to his car in black slacks, a white collar shirt, and a tie. 103 degrees outside. Albert looked me over, opened the car door, and said: "That's how you do it. That's how you show up to work."

I wore the same outfit every day that summer.

More people need to spend a summer with Albert.

Over the past month, I've been in conversations with nearly a dozen potential AI implementation partners. I want them to take my SOPs and build an AI workflow that does it better than what I've built.

Smart people. Most of them genuinely know what they're doing.

But nine out of ten of them? NGMI.

Not because of the AI stuff. They can do the AI stuff. What they can't do is run a business. Knowing how to build something and knowing how to show up for the person paying you are two completely different skill sets.

One ghosted a scheduled Zoom call last week. I'm sitting there, calendar blocked, prep done, staring at an empty Zoom room for ten minutes. No message. No reschedule. Nothing. I close the tab, open Twitter, and there he is... posting a thread about "building trust with clients."

I wish I was exaggerating this for the sake of this article. I am not.

Another one...a guy running a $10M/year business, not exactly some random freelancer...took three days to respond to something that was costing me money while we waited. Three days.

And when the reply finally came, it was a voice memo. No apology, no acknowledgment that the delay mattered. Just "hey man, here's what I'm thinking." Like we were brainstorming over beers and not hemorrhaging margin.

And it's not limited to vendors or partners. I know founders...people whose company is on fire, team waiting on decisions, clients in limbo...who disappear for a week. No comms. Not on vacation. Just gone. The team is pinging Slack like they're sending signals into deep space.

Then Monday rolls around: "oh sorry guys, I got caught up with some stuff." Your COO has been holding the building together while its on fire and you got caught up with some stuff. If you don't care, don't expect your employees to.

This isn't a few bad apples. It's a wave. And it has no age bracket nor title limitation.

Here's what I think is actually happening: Kids these days just don't want to work anymore. (Kidding.)

AI lowered the barrier to start a business. What it didn't lower is the barrier to run one well. And a lot of people creating companies out of thin air right now have genuinely never seen an operationally excellent company.

They don't know what greatness looks like. It's like if this generation of basketball players never saw Jordan or Kobe or Shaq play... they wouldn't know what's possible. So they don't even try to ascend to that level.

The content machine made it worse. Everyone posts revenue charts. Nobody shares NPS scores or client satisfaction rates. The market rewards the pitch. So people learned the pitch, and ignored the delivery.

I actually Googled "unseriousness in business" on a whim recently — turns out this is a named, documented macro-trend now. Behavioral unseriousness: individuals who lack commitment, focus, or follow-through. Failure to deliver on promises. Now so common, we’re agreeing on terminology for it. As the kids would say: chat, are we cooked?

The pattern isn't hard to see. What it tells me is that fundamentals aren't declining because people are lazy. They're declining because the market feedback loop is broken. You can build an audience while running operations like trash. You can close new clients while your existing ones are miserable. For a while.

So what do you actually do about it? It's up to you, but here's what I'm doing:

I'm actively window shopping. Always. I want a person(s) and a technology solution for every problem in business. Full stop. Multiple options. I rotate in the best person for the job... not "oh here's one guy I worked with years ago who was pretty good." All ballers, jersey on, ready to play. My trusted network becomes my moat.

Because even your best people represent key man risk. The partners you love working with today don't have unlimited capacity. They won't be great forever. And the truly excellent ones? They're booked out with waitlists and they're selective about who they take on. When I need someone, I typically need them within a few weeks. I don't want to be choosing the B player just because I didn't already have a relationship with the A player who's ready to go.

And the simpler half of this is embarrassingly basic. Set expectations early, and often. Then meet them. If you can't deliver on time, say so before the deadline, not after. Call people when something changes instead of going quiet. That's genuinely it most of the time.

Now... am I 100% consistent at this? No. Nobody is. I have a newborn baby at home. I have an 18-year-old graduating next month who is having meltdowns over her prom dress that require Dad intervention. I'm training for a backcountry elk hunt in September that has real consequences if I'm not prepared for it. Life doesn't pause because your Slack is blowing up.

So I go on offense. I hired an excellent executive assistant whose primary job is to sweep my email and Slack for potential issues before they become real ones. I've set up AI workflows that review my work weekly and surface repeatable tasks we can automate...buying back time I spend actually serving clients instead of drowning in the noise.

The point isn't perfection. It's building systems that catch what you miss. So when life happens...and it will...your clients never feel it.

So many people are going to get burned in this AI gold rush. Vendors who overpromise. Partners who disappear. Founders who confuse starting a company with running one. In that environment, being the person people genuinely like working with...someone who shows up, communicates, and delivers...that's a real life hack right now. Not a sexy one. But a durable one.

There's a version of all this that points inward. If your team goes quiet instead of resetting expectations when things get hard...pay attention. Culture runs downhill. What you tolerate from the people around you is what your clients eventually experience on the other end.

I'm cutting ties with people I've worked with for years. Not bad blood. Just slippage... the slow kind, where promises start falling through and communication goes quiet instead of louder. When your clients are paying you real money, trusting you to make recommendations they apply immediately... you can't carry the burden of someone else's slippage.

Your brand is your reputation. Not what your website says about you. What people say when someone asks if they should work with you. Whether the work was there when you said it would be. Whether you picked up the phone when things went sideways, or ghosted and hoped nobody noticed.

The businesses flooding the market right now...the ones running near-nonexistent operations while chasing the next close...they churn out fast. The reputation catches up. It always does.

The ones still standing in three years are going to be the people who figured out that AI is the accelerant, not the engine. That the fundamentals haven't changed. That showing up is still 80% of the work.

You just aren't serious people...or you are.

Albert knew which one I was on day one. Your clients are figuring out the same thing about you right now.

– Chris Piper

I wrote this piece because of Albert.

A few weeks ago, he crossed my mind for the first time in decades. The man who hired a 14-year-old kid with no experience with a fresh divorce at home and a father I wouldn’t see for many years. Who looked at that kid in a tie in 103-degree heat and decided that was someone worth investing in.

Albert ran multiple businesses from his cell phone and a back office behind his restaurant. He never talked about hustle culture or morning routines. He just showed up. Every single day. And he treated every person who walked through his door like their time mattered and always offered up a plate of hospitality in the form of great Mexican food.

I wanted to reconnect with him. Tell him what that summer meant to me. That the way I run my business, the way I show up for clients, the standard I hold myself to... it started with him. To tell him thank you.

I Googled his name and all I was able to find was his recent obituary.

If someone shaped who you are and made a positive impact on your life...don't sit on that. Pick up the phone. Write the letter. Send the text. You don't know how much life they have left.

And when you can, be someone’s Albert. The world needs you.