Two Booms, One Garage: What Watching This Happen Twice Taught Me About Staying Current

In the late eighties and early nineties, my father and a friend of his ran a small business out of a garage. They built XT computers by hand and wired them into Novell NetWare networks, then sold the whole setup to whoever in the surrounding towns needed one. I was in my early teens, underfoot more than useful, but that garage is where I first learned what a computer actually was: not a magic box, just a set of parts somebody understood well enough to sell.

I bring that up because I've watched this movie once already. And what's happening in tech right now is not a sequel. It's a different genre entirely, running at a speed the garage-era version of this business never approached.

I actually left IT for a while. By the 2010s I was burned out on the work itself and moved into operations and business development, mostly in healthcare, work that had nothing to do with servers or networks. It was a good stretch, and I don't regret it. But this current wave of change is what pulled me back into the field I started in. I didn't come back because tech got fun again on its own. I came back because the scale of what's changing is genuinely hard to look away from, even from the outside.

This isn't just a tech story anymore

Here's the part that matters if you're not in tech at all: you don't get to sit this one out just because computers aren't your business.

The pace of change happening right now is touching the retail shop on Main Street, the local mechanic, the HVAC company running four trucks. New tools show up faster than they used to. New voices show up louder, everybody with an opinion on what you should be doing differently. And the overall rhythm of change has gotten faster across the board, not just in software. If you run a small business today, some version of this pressure is already sitting on your desk, whether you asked for it or not.

"Put your head down" is not bad advice

For a lot of owners, the honest reflex is to tune it out. Put your head down, keep doing the thing that's working, ignore the noise.

I want to say clearly: that instinct is not wrong. You don't have to reshape your business around every new gadget, every platform update, every tool somebody on LinkedIn swears changed their life. Most of it is noise. Chasing it is a great way to spend money and time you don't have on things that don't move your business forward. If your process works and your customers are happy, that's not a problem that needs solving.

But there's a difference between ignoring the noise and losing your situational awareness entirely, and that difference is the whole point of this piece.

The practice that actually works

You don't need to become a technologist to run a business well in a fast-moving decade. You need to stay oriented. That's a much smaller commitment than it sounds like, and it doesn't require becoming an expert in anything outside your own field.

Here's the version of it I'd actually suggest: a few minutes, a couple of times a week, where you're not doing the work, just watching it from a distance. Read a headline. Notice what a competitor down the road just started doing. Pay attention to what your own customers are starting to expect and ask for.

Then ask yourself two questions:

Where is this actually headed in six months to a year? Most trends announce themselves well before they matter. The businesses that get caught flat-footed usually had time to see it coming, they just weren't looking.

Would this actually improve what I offer, or is it more trouble than it's worth? Not everything that's trending is worth adopting. Plenty of it is worth watching and doing nothing about, for now. The question isn't whether something is new. It's whether it moves your product, your service, or your customer relationships forward.

That's the entire practice. No dashboards, no newsletters you have to keep up with, no pressure to have an opinion on everything. Just a standing habit of looking up from the work often enough to notice which direction things are moving.

Competent generalist, not industry expert

You don't need to be an expert on anything outside your primary field. You need to be a competent generalist about the landscape your business operates in, someone who can hold a rough, current picture of where things stand and where they're headed, even without deep expertise in any one piece of it.

That's a lower bar than it sounds like, and it pays off in a specific way: confidence. Not confidence that you've adopted every new thing, confidence that you've actually looked, and that the decision to stay the course was a decision, not a blind spot. The owners who get hurt aren't usually the ones who ignored a trend on purpose. They're the ones who never looked up long enough to know it was coming, and found out two years later that the ground had moved without them.

I spent my early teens in a garage watching two people figure out a wave of technology as it happened, one machine at a time. I'm back in this field now because the current wave is bigger than that one by orders of magnitude, and I'd rather help small business owners keep their bearings in it than watch them either chase every shiny tool or get blindsided by the one that actually mattered.

If you want a second set of eyes on which end of that spectrum you're closer to, reach out. That conversation is free, and it's usually short.