I'm Mickey. I run MNMS — a managed-print company in Fort Worth, Texas that has slowly become a house of brands — and I write the software that runs it, on hardware I own, in a building I rent. I am not a content creator, a thought leader, or for hire on retainer. What follows is what I'm actually building this week, and a few opinions I'm willing to defend.
The managed-print operations platform I wrote because nothing else fit. Multi-tenant PHP. Runs day-to-day operations — automated meter reads, per-page billing, supply forecasting, accounting sync. Opening it to other independent providers in 2026.
A fifteen-year-old Texas LLC that has slowly turned into a holding company. Brands across managed print, parts, rentals, regional service. Each one sellable standalone. Built without a dollar of outside capital.
A local AI agent daemon I run on the cluster. It is not as smart as the frontier models. It is mine, it runs on hardware I own, and it costs nothing to operate. That is the point.
An "Empire Builder" platform for solo operators who want a serious multi-state legal structure without paying a law firm by the hour. Same codebase as VoltOps, separate surface. Internal pilot first, public later in 2026.
Owning the building is cheap. Owning the dependency on someone else's building is the expensive part.
— a working note, kept on the wallWatched a board die during a firmware upgrade. Bought a CH341A clip for the price of a coffee, lifted the BIOS chip, reflashed it from a dump I had taken weeks earlier, soldered it back. It boots. The lesson is not "learn to flash chips." The lesson is that owning your hardware means you can fix it when nobody is coming to help you.
Spent two days running my own outbound mail. The residential line my building sits on does not let me touch reverse DNS, and most receiving servers will not trust mail without it. There is a fix that costs $200 a month for a business line. There is also a free relay that handles outbound for me. I took the relay. Owning the inbox is what matters; owning every link of the outbound chain is not.
Most of the SaaS we considered for our trade was priced for a fifty-tech operator chasing mid-market accounts. We are six people serving small business in Fort Worth. The pricing curve does not work. The workflow does not match. So I wrote our own, in plain PHP, from scratch. The argument against this is "you should not write your own software." The argument for is that ours actually fits.
A couple of whiteboxes and a small arbiter, in the corner of an industrial unit on the edge of Fort Worth. It is not impressive infrastructure by anyone's standard but mine. The point is that the data sits in a building I rent, on disks I bought, replicated to a backup machine I can reach in two minutes. That is the whole pitch.
// none of this is in the cloud. cloud is fine. it just isn't mine.
Best way: a real email with a real first paragraph. I read everything. I reply to most things — usually within a day or two, sometimes longer if I'm in the rack.