Why the Business Is Built This Way Introducing Broadaxe Digital

I arrived at the property on December 20, 2024 — with my wife Julie, our two kids, and a 2002 Fleetwood Bounder named Sheila, parked on 14.95 wooded acres outside Monongah, West Virginia, on a ridge above a creek called Little Mill Fall Run. We'd sold a 40-acre farm in Colorado two months earlier. This was the next thing. The thing we'd been building toward.

Broadaxe Digital came out of that moment — not despite the homestead, but because of it.

Most business introductions start with credentials. Mine starts here because the land is the reason the business is structured the way it is. Three clients maximum. Twenty billable hours a week. Async-first, morning-focused, no scope creep, no exceptions.

Those aren't apologies for limitations. They're the architecture of a life I chose on purpose — and the reason every client who works with me gets my full capacity instead of the leftover hours of someone stretched across a dozen engagements.

The mission behind all of it is simple: give humans more time to do human things. The business serves the life. Not the other way around.

The Work I Come From

Before there was Broadaxe Digital, there was a career that most people couldn't trace in a straight line if they tried.

I started in the U.S. Air Force managing military communications infrastructure. After that, SI International and the GIG-BE defense network program. Then CACI, supporting the NRO at TS/SCI CI Poly clearance — classified intelligence systems, the kind of infrastructure most people will never see the inside of. DISH Network's IT security engineering. Qwest and CenturyLink on WAN and MAN. Viasat, where I moved from cloud engineer to data center manager for an OpenStack deployment serving hundreds of thousands of subscribers.

Twenty years. Military, intelligence community, enterprise IT, telecom, cloud infrastructure. I've held the security policies I now write. I've operated the networks I now document. I've run the data centers whose architecture I now describe in white papers.

That background is not a credentials list. It's the operating experience that makes every Broadaxe Digital deliverable accurate at a level someone who only researched the topic can't match. When I write a NIST 800-171 control narrative, I'm writing from inside the systems that control describes. When I draft a compliance gap analysis, I know what an assessor will actually challenge — because I've been on the other side of those conversations.

That's what earned authority means. Not credentials. Precision.

What Broadaxe Digital Does

Three service lines — each grounded in that same operational depth, each built to compound on the others.

Technical Writing and Documentation. Security policies, System Security Plans, NIST 800-171 control narratives, CMMC gap analyses, and HIPAA documentation for compliance-driven work. Network architecture documents, SOPs, runbooks, and data center operations guides for teams that need their infrastructure on paper. White papers, technical guides, and practitioner handbooks for organizations that need authoritative long-form content. Online courses and training materials for subject matter experts whose knowledge needs to reach a wider audience.

The through-line: written by someone who has operated the systems being described, for the people who will use the document — not just the ones who commissioned it.

Grant Writing. Federal and state infrastructure grant applications — BEAD broadband funding, USDA ReConnect, ARC, EDA, and state-level programs — for ISPs, electric cooperatives, municipalities, and nonprofits pursuing rural connectivity funding. West Virginia holds the second-highest per-capita BEAD allocation in the country. $1.2 billion is moving toward deployment. The communities that application money reaches are the communities I live in. The cultural fluency and local specificity that matters in these narratives isn't something I researched. It's where I am.

AI Knowledge Management. The most valuable thing in most small businesses is the operational knowledge that lives in one or two people's heads — the processes, relationships, and decisions that keep the operation running and that no document has ever captured. I build AI skill libraries that encode that knowledge in a structured, retrievable form before it walks out the door with the person who holds it. Not a filing cabinet. A working system that makes institutional knowledge accessible to the people who need it, at the moment they need it.

That last service line is where the three converge. Grant writing helps rural organizations access the funding to build infrastructure. Documentation makes that infrastructure legible and defensible. Knowledge management makes it productive from day one. The same buyer, the same moment — and no one else in this market is positioned to offer all three.

Why West Virginia, Why Now

Marion County qualifies under federal economic distress criteria. All 55 West Virginia counties sit in the Appalachian Regional Commission footprint. Broadband construction under the BEAD program is expected to begin this year, connecting tens of thousands of unserved and underserved locations — communities that have never had reliable internet access.

That connectivity changes everything. The organizations newly online will need documentation support, grant writing expertise, and knowledge infrastructure they haven't had to build before. The firms positioned to help them are the ones already here, already embedded in the landscape, already fluent in the funding programs and the operational reality.

That's not a marketing claim. That's geography.

I'm writing from a ridge in Marion County. The creek below the property is a riparian restoration project. The woodlot is being cleared by hand, section by section. The RV is a temporary setup while we build out what the homestead is becoming — a working homestead, a long-term land project, the reason the business exists. The work I do for clients funds that build. The constraints I operate under — the hard cap on clients, the 20-hour week, the async-first schedule — are what make both things sustainable at the same time.

How I Work

Broadaxe Digital runs async-first. Client communication by email. Synchronous calls by exception only, and always schedulable. Morning hours for demanding cognitive work. A hard cap on concurrent clients that protects the quality of every engagement. No scope additions without a written change order. Every project starts with a clear statement of what will be delivered and what falls outside the scope.

If you need technical documentation that will hold up under scrutiny, grant narratives that understand what reviewers are actually scoring on, or knowledge systems that protect what your organization knows — contact me through broadaxedigital.com.

Broadaxe Digital · Monongah, Marion County, West Virginia

"Docs and grants for the infrastructure age."