I’m Mike Reynolds. I live in Columbus, Ohio with my wife Lauren, our two kids (Eli is 6, Nora is 4), and a golden retriever named Miles who thinks every walk is a personal achievement.
I help small American teams—mostly 5 to 20 people in sales, operations, local services, agencies, and B2B software—stop losing work in email, Slack, spreadsheets, and half-dead CRMs. I do it with simple tools, clean systems, and almost zero productivity theater.
This site is where I put the actual work.
The problem I’m tired of
Most productivity content falls into one of three buckets:
Pretty Notion screenshots that look great until a real human has to use them on a Tuesday afternoon when they’re already behind.
Tool roundups that treat every new AI feature like it just cured cancer.
High-level “frameworks” that sound smart in a LinkedIn post and collapse the first time someone has to hand work off to a teammate who isn’t as organized as the author.
I’ve sat in both seats. I started in manufacturing supply-chain coordination where a bad Excel sheet or a vague email could wreck a day. Later I was Ops Manager at a 200-person B2B SaaS company building sales ops systems from scratch. Then I got laid off during the pandemic and had to rebuild my own freelance operating system with Notion and Zapier because I needed something that actually worked, not something that looked impressive in a demo.
What survived that process is simple: if a workflow does not work when the person doing the work is tired, distracted, or slightly annoyed, it does not count.
The Pegboard Rule
I keep a pegboard in the garage. Tools hang by type and by how likely my neighbor is to borrow them. Nothing fancy. Nothing optimized for Instagram. Just clear, labeled, and easy to put back.
That’s the standard I use for digital systems too.
If it takes longer to set up than to do the actual work, I’m out.
Meat, heat, bun. Same rule applies to your CRM, your project tracker, and your client intake process. Stop adding features.
Repeat what works. Tweak one thing at a time.
This blog is the digital version of that pegboard. You’ll see the real setups I use or build for clients. You’ll see the versions that failed. You’ll see ugly screenshots, hand-drawn arrows, and the exact number of hours something saved (or didn’t). No polished before-and-after that hides the mess.
What you’ll find here
Real Setups — step-by-step breakdowns of Notion dashboards, Zapier automations, CRM cleanups, client intake systems, and the rest. Not theory. The actual tables, the actual fields, the actual handoff.
Tool Trials — honest tests inside real work. What broke, what saved time, who should use it, who should skip it.
Small Team Ops — practical advice for teams that don’t have a full-time ops person and don’t need another dashboard.
The Pegboard Principle — the philosophy pieces. Garage organization, football playbooks, BBQ simplicity, manufacturing flow, and the constraints of having a 4-year-old who will interrupt you mid-automation.
Hours Saved — the quantified ones. Old way vs new way. Time difference. Whether it was worth maintaining.
I’m not here to sell you “AI transformation.” I’m here to show you the setup that got the follow-up done, the form that replaced eleven emails, and the weekly reset that kept a small team from falling apart on a Monday.
If you’re a small-business owner, team lead, solo consultant, ops manager, sales manager, or freelancer who already has too many apps and still loses work in the cracks, this is for you.
I’ll publish the real stuff. Screenshots, failed attempts, numbers, and all.
Let’s get to work.
— Mike
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