The Skill Behind 255 Million Households (and Why It's the Same One AI Needs)

In 2008, I was a broke filmmaker with an associate's degree, 200 hours of raw footage, and a dog named Sonic.

I was trying to get a documentary onto public television. I had no connections, no track record, and no idea how public television even worked.

Here's how it actually works. Every PBS station sends its program director to something called the Fall Marketplace. Think of it as public television's version of Sundance. Around 250 directors sit in a room and watch hundreds of submissions.

To get picked up, you need 50 votes out of 250. That's the bar. Just get noticed by one in five.

I didn't have a distribution budget. I had a laptop, a stack of client branding work I'd done to pay the bills, and a hunch.

The hunch was this: nobody in that room was going to judge my footage first. They were going to judge my packaging first. So before I finished the film, I reverse engineered the covers, the posters, and the credit sequences of every well-funded documentary I could find. Same fonts. Same layout logic. Same conventions professional distributors expected to see.

I got 200 votes. Not 50. Two hundred.

That documentary, Paving The Way, went on to win four Telly Awards and reach an estimated 255 million households through PBS distribution.

Here's the part that matters for this piece. I didn't win with a better story. Plenty of filmmakers in that room had better stories. I won with a system, the same one I later wrote up in my book as the Brand Steps: build the identity first, and the perception of quality follows it into every room before the work itself arrives.

Years later, I ran that same instinct at Grimco, a $500 million manufacturer, as their fractional CMO. Same move, different arena: build the system before you chase the outcome. That funnel produced over 30,500 qualified leads and returns up to 1,200% ROI.

Two completely different industries. Same underlying skill. Turn something chaotic into something repeatable, before anyone else in the room has figured out how.

That is also, almost exactly, the skill organizations with nobody in charge of AI are missing.

Most companies don't need someone who understands transformer architecture. They need someone who can walk into the chaos of “we should probably be doing something with AI” and do what I did in that documentary. Build the system first. Make the perception of competence real. Then let the results catch up to it.

I call it the Systems Instinct. It's the same instinct whether the deliverable is a film, a funnel, or an AI deployment. The room changes. The instinct doesn't.

I still use it every day. I used it to write this piece. The proof it works is simple: you're still reading it.

I'm applying it now to how companies deploy AI into real operations, not theory. If that's the role you're trying to fill, or the role I should be filling, that's the conversation worth having.