I don't work off conjecture.
Not anecdote, not assumption, not whatever this month's marketing weather says. There is always a way to measure what is actually happening; my job is collecting those measurements, reading them honestly, and acting on what they say.
Greg Drake runs Greg Drake Digital, a one-person web and digital practice in Petaluma, California. He has been building on computers since a TRS-80 with a cassette tape drive, founded a technology-forward veterinary startup in the first dot-com era, spent two decades running businesses, and returned to full-time technology when modern AI arrived, building tools and integrations with it daily. The method has not changed: measure first, recommend from evidence, publish numbers with tools and dates. He takes a limited number of clients, one to one.
The machines changed. The discipline didn't.
I started in grade school on a Radio Shack TRS-80 wired to a television, typing BASIC into command lines and saving text games to cassette tape. You learned fast that the machine does exactly what the evidence says it will do, and nothing that your hopes say.
Then life took the long way around. I founded a technology-forward veterinary startup in the first dot-com era, ran operations for businesses, raced bicycles professionally, managed a real estate office, administered IT, and consulted for business owners. Through all of it I was the person in the room who understood the technology, deciding what to build and what to hire out. Then I retired early.
ChatGPT ended the retirement. I went back to my first love, buried myself in the new AI systems, and have been building tools and integrations with them every day since. Greg Drake Digital exists because professionals and business owners kept asking for the same thing: someone to walk them into a digital era where new intelligence arrives in real time, faster than any change the web has seen before.
The through-line is the same as it was on the cassette drive: understand the machine, make it work for people. Not the other way around.
Forty years, the long way around.
Learning the machine
Grade school. A Radio Shack TRS-80, a television for a monitor, a cassette deck for storage. BASIC typed in by hand, one line at a time. The lesson that stuck: computers do what you tell them, not what you meant.
Running businesses, both sides of the desk
Founder of a technology-forward veterinary startup in the first dot-com era. Operating manager, professional cyclist, real estate office manager, IT administrator, business consultant. Two decades of buying, running, and judging technology from the owner's chair.
Early retirement
Out of the game by choice. It did not last, and the reason it did not is the next era.
Back to the first love
ChatGPT arrived and technology became the day job again. Buried in the new AI systems since: building tools, integrations, and monitoring, first on my own systems, then for clients who need a guide into an era that reinvents itself monthly.
Petaluma, on purpose.
I live and work in Petaluma, California. I serve Sonoma County and the North Bay in person: Petaluma, Santa Rosa, Rohnert Park, Sebastopol, Sonoma, Novato, and the towns in between. Beyond that, the work travels fine over a screen share, so remote clients get the same practice.
One person is the feature.
One person, deliberately. The person who audits your site writes the quote, does the work, and answers when something breaks. Nothing is lost in a handoff because there are no handoffs. You talk to the person doing the work, every time. What used to take an agency team now takes one careful person with modern tools and AI handling the repetitive parts, and the receipts on the evidence page are how you check that claim instead of trusting it.
That is also why I am selective about new clients. The one-to-one commitment is the thing you are buying, and I will not water it down to grow, so my availability is limited. If I am at capacity I will tell you plainly and tell you when that changes.
Evidence over opinion
Every recommendation names the tool that measured it and the date it was measured, and I keep the raw records.
Fair accounting
Findings start with what is working. Every proposal includes what I recommend you not buy.
You own everything
Domain, site, content, accounts. A complete copy of all of it, whenever you ask.
Month to month
Fixed written quotes, no long contracts, no hourly meter running while you talk.
See the method on your own site first.
The free baseline reading is the easiest way to see how I work: you send your web address, I send back five measurements of how your site is doing, each dated, each explained in one sentence, free.
Either way you get me, not a queue.