A few things up front: I'm a father of three and a grandfather a handful of times over. I live in the coffee triangle of Colombia, where the water runs clean out of the mountain and the coffee is — I'll argue this with anyone — the best in the world. And for the better part of four decades I've been a builder and an entrepreneur: the kind who's happiest figuring out how something really works, and then making it work better.
How I got here
I started early. My first job was lifeguarding at the local pool at twelve. I bought my first house at eighteen, earned my real estate broker's license at nineteen, was developing land at twenty, and by twenty-three I'd built an insurance agency recognized as the fastest-growing in Houston, Texas — out of some 7,000 competitors. (I also spent my last year of high school as Texas' top bull rider — but that's a story for another page.)
Somewhere in those years I picked up the idea that would shape everything after: the quality loop — the discipline of constantly reimagining and reengineering a business to make it better and more efficient. I also learned something about myself: I liked rebuilding businesses more than running them.
So I sold the agency and took over marketing for a mid-sized Texas insurance company, where I broke every sales record two years running. Then a bank recruited me into its technology group, and I found a second love — technology. When the FDIC came calling during the multibillion-dollar bailout of nearly 1,000 failed banks, I jumped. My knack for reengineering earned me a top Automation Specialist role, and the agency invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in my formal training in business process reengineering, business intelligence, and computer-aided system engineering.
That work took me to TranTech — since merged into the world's largest government contractor — where I was promoted to contract manager over a dozen business-process-reengineering projects and nearly 1,000 staff, serving the DOD, DOJ, USPS, IRS, and other large organizations. I got very good at one thing in particular: sitting down with the people who actually ran an operation, understanding what it really did, and rebuilding it to cost less and run better.
Then the internet arrived, and I had a front-row seat. As Chief Technology Officer of eCampus.com — a $100-million, household-name-backed startup — we built data centers and payment systems by hand, back when you couldn't simply buy a website, and helped pioneer some of the earliest online storefronts. Company leadership made some costly marketing blunders, and eCampus stumbled into bankruptcy — so a few investors and I arranged to buy it out. I took off my technology hat, took on the marketing, and grew sales from $4 million to a healthy $21 million. This was also where I first learned to rank in search engines before anyone really knew how — by taking the businesses already winning and reverse-engineering them, a habit that matters again now (more on that below).
Then the call of another challenge took me to Denver's largest direct-marketing company, which had run through four e-commerce directors before me. I brought the quality loop, and sales climbed from $30 million to over $100 million in about thirteen months. A year or two later I co-founded Convertis — same methodology — and watched sales go from zero to nearly a $20-million run rate. After we sold, I started Ad Leverage and National Gift, with similar results.
A general timeline
- Lifeguard — my first job, at twelve
- Bought my first rental property
- One of Texas' youngest licensed real estate brokers
- Founder — fastest-growing insurance agency in Houston
- VP of Sales — MWM Insurance
- Chief Technology Officer — First Bank
- Automation Specialist — FDIC
- BPR Lead — a dozen agency & corporate projects
- Chief Technology Officer — eCampus.com
- Chief Marketing Officer — eCampus.com
- VP / Director of E-commerce — Denver's largest direct-marketing company
- Co-Founder — Convertis
- Founder — National Gift
- Founder — Ad Leverage
- Founder — Clean Earth Mining Company
- Founder — Outsource South America
- Founder — Staff For Half
- Founder — TV LLC (dba AIBusinessScore.com)
- Founder — TV LLC (dba viizable.com)
Where I've lived
After I sold most of those companies, I spent several years traveling — from Nome, Alaska nearly to the southern tip of South America, more than 200 cities. I was looking for something specific: a place where the water was pure enough to drink straight from the ground, the food was clean, and life moved at a human pace. I'd sat in coffee shops in New York and Seattle wondering what that coffee would taste like at the farm it came from. I found out in Colombia — better — and I expect I'll be here the rest of my days.
On one of those trips — a vacation in Mexico, of all things — I got pulled into helping two struggling resorts. We reimagined them from the ground up, and they became two of the most popular "alternative" resorts in the country: occupancy now runs around 90%, and nightly rates have climbed from $85 to $400 per person. Turns out the quality loop works just as well on a beach as it does in a boardroom.
Along the way I opened an outsourcing company of my own — Outsource South America, headquartered in Peru, with a team of around 150 people drawn from Peru, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Mexico, Venezuela, and Colombia. I spent some of the best years of my working life going office to office, getting to know people from all over the continent. It turned out to be a good place to build a life, too: clean food, strong families, and time that stretches out instead of rushing past.
What I'm up to now
A year or so ago I came back to work in the United States for one reason: AI is quietly stepping in between local businesses and their customers, and a lot of the good people I've worked with over the years are about to get blindsided. So my son and co-founder and our team set out to analyze how to get into the various AI apps. We ended up reverse-engineering more than 30,000 businesses AI already recommends, finding the roughly 150 factors that matter, and building the tools — and writing the books — to help local businesses get into those recommendations. Building it alongside my son makes it more fun than work.
My current slate of projects — and the best way to reach me — lives at brenttuttle.com.
A few other things I care about
I invest in things I believe in close to home — ColombianVisas.com, which helps people relocate to Colombia, and BocasBeach.com, which helps people find Caribbean-facing and coastal real estate. But mostly I'm a builder who got curious about how AI picks winners and couldn't sit on a beach knowing a lot of good people were about to get blindsided. So here I am, helping as many of them as I can.