Ten years in industry. Twenty in the classroom. Then I started building the things I kept wishing existed.

I started in the private sector. For about ten years I helped companies and universities work through environmental regulations: reading rules nobody wanted to read, building the records that proved compliance, and explaining both to people who had an organization to run and no interest in the paperwork.

Then I made a deliberate change and moved into education. I have been there more than twenty years, most of it in classrooms with students still learning English. The job was not really about content. It was about taking something genuinely difficult and making it understandable to someone who had every reason to tune out, using whatever equipment happened to work that morning.

Somewhere in there I noticed how much of my week was not teaching. It was retyping the same information into three systems, building the same report every month, and rewriting the same materials at four reading levels. So I started automating my own job. Scripts first, then proper tools.

Then I built things for the students: vocabulary sets where every word had a picture, pronunciation practice that showed how a sound is physically made, science readers written so the language was not the barrier to the science. Those tools are still on this site, still free, and still used. You can go and click on them right now, which is more than most consultancies can offer.

Small business owners turn out to have the identical problem. Not enough hours, no technical staff, and a stack of software nobody chose deliberately. I recognized it straight away, because it is what my regulatory clients were dealing with thirty years ago and what I dealt with as a teacher. Same job, different building.