I started in 1982, when business computing was itself a major and uncertain transition. That was the first of four I've worked through. AI is the one happening now — and the questions owners have to answer haven't changed as much as the technology has.
Ken NangleKen Nangle Consulting
I began in 1982 as the owner of Micronet Business Systems, selling and supporting the first generation of business computers — at a point when most owners were still deciding whether a personal computer was a serious tool or an expensive novelty.
While Micronet wound down, I built up The Power Store, an IT consulting and custom software firm. I ran it for seventeen years and grew it to 55 people, advising companies through the arrival of the networked office, client-server systems, and the early commercial internet.
Later, as the franchisee of The Alternative Board in San Francisco, I coached and advised roughly 35 small businesses across the city — owners working through succession, growth, hiring, and margin, most of which had nothing to do with technology at all. That work sharpened something the consulting years had only suggested: the constraint is almost never the software.
Since then I've worked as a technology executive, a business owner, and a consultant to small and midsize companies through e-commerce, mobile, and cloud. Four transitions. Every one arrived wrapped in language suggesting the technology was the point, and every one rewarded the owners who understood their own operation well enough to say precisely what it changed.
The software is never the hard part. Knowing what you actually need it to tell you is.
Ken Nangle — Ken Nangle Consulting
Not which tool to buy. Where it matters in this business, what to do first, what to leave alone, and how to prepare the people it will affect.
Every transition I've watched produced companies that came out stronger and companies that came out weaker, and the gap was almost never explained by who adopted earliest. It was explained by who could say precisely what the new thing changed about their own operation.
That's a judgment problem, not a technology problem. It's the same problem in 2026 as it was in 1982, and it's the part I'm actually useful for.
I write software. That's unusual for an advisor, and it changes the advice — when I might have to build what I recommend, the recommendation stays grounded in what can actually be delivered.
It also means an engagement doesn't have to end at a document. If a review surfaces something worth testing, I can build it and we find out.
The industries I know best, I know from the inside — how the money actually moves, where the effort goes, what the early warning signs are. But the more revealing test is an industry I didn't start out knowing.
My firm took on a real estate investment trust whose dozens of properties reported through disconnected systems, dragging SEC reporting out to two or three weeks — slow enough that investors had begun to distrust the numbers. I brought in the engagement and put a lead developer and infrastructure team on it; the system they built brought reporting under a week, and the restored confidence contributed to tens of millions of dollars in increased value.
I took a partially built mobile platform for a major California utility — a demand-response program that let customers sell unused capacity back to the grid, which the utility resold into the commercial market at a premium — and finished it myself, having known nothing about utility economics when I started. It became one of the more successful systems I've been part of.
For a private-equity firm consolidating oncology practices across two cities, my firm learned enough about how those practices operated, and how clinical data moves, to pool patient-outcome data across separate groups and run the data operation on the ground in both locations — work I directed start to finish.
None of those is my "specialty." That's the point — before I recommend anything, I want to understand how a business actually makes money and where the effort goes, even when that means learning an industry from the ground up first. It takes longer at the start and saves considerably more later.
Professional services firms
Health, fitness, and wellness businesses
Distribution and light manufacturing
Retail and hospitality
Owner-operated businesses across the North Bay and San Francisco
I want to understand how the company makes money and where the effort goes before anyone mentions a tool. Technology decisions made without that context are guesses with invoices attached.
Everything is scoped so you can judge whether it worked before committing to the next thing. Stopping should always be a real option, not an expensive one.
If I can't explain a recommendation in terms you can repeat to your team, I don't understand it well enough yet. Jargon usually hides uncertainty rather than expertise.
I'm in Sonoma County and I work across Sonoma, Napa, and Marin. Some conversations go better in a room, and I'd rather drive than schedule another video call.