Before I built websites for restaurants and wine farms, I worked in them.

For years, my office was a wine estate floor. Bartinney. Muratie. A stint at sea on Cunard's Queen Victoria. I poured tastings, worked service, sold wine — and got my Cape Wine Academy certificate and WSET Level 2 along the way. I know what a quiet Tuesday feels like when the bookings don't come. I've watched owners check the reservations sheet and try not to look worried.

When lockdown shut the industry down, I had a business and IT degree, a laptop, and time. So I taught myself to build — YouTube tutorials by day, broken code by night. Not in theory. I built a real thing: a wine recommendation tool for the Cape Winelands, because I was obsessed with helping people find the right estate for them. I only discovered later that Vivino had built something similar with a team and funding. I'd built mine alone, for free, because I couldn't not build it.

That project changed everything. It got me into wine-tech work, and it taught me the lesson Zumesco Tech is built on:

The businesses I'd spent years working inside — the estates, the restaurants, the guesthouses — were brilliant at what they did and invisible where it counted.

Their websites were brochures. Their Google profiles were ghost towns. And just as they were starting to figure out Google, the ground moved again: customers began asking ChatGPT and Gemini who to book instead.

So that's what I do now. I take businesses I understand from the inside — because I've carried the plates and poured the tastings — and make them the answer when their next customer asks.

I didn't learn this industry from a marketing course. I learned it on the floor, during service.

Because I can walk into a guesthouse, a salon, a café, or a plumbing business and already know where the time goes and where the money leaks. I've been the staff member doing the manual work. I've seen what a slow season does to an owner.

Most agencies serve these businesses from the outside — templates, retainers, ranking reports. I build from the inside: what does this specific business need to appear in the answers its customers are already asking for, and what's stealing the owner's hours once the enquiries come in?

That's also why I keep the entry point simple. Not a retainer. Not a “strategy engagement.” A free report that shows you, in screenshots, what ChatGPT and Google actually say about your business — and the three fixes that matter most. What you do with it is up to you.