My phone number is on every page of this website. Not a form that routes to a queue, not a chatbot, not a "book a 15-minute discovery call" funnel. The actual number. It rings my actual phone, and when I can, I actually answer it.
People find this mildly strange in 2026, which tells you something about 2026.
The math nobody runs
The case against answering the phone is efficiency. Calls are interruptions. They don't scale. You can't batch them. Every productivity system ever written will tell you to put a layer between yourself and the people trying to reach you, so you can handle them on your schedule instead of theirs.
Here's what that math leaves out: most of the best things that have happened in my career arrived through a conversation I couldn't have predicted or scheduled. A referral that turned into years of work. A "hey, do you do this kind of thing too?" that opened a whole line of business. A client who stayed for a decade because the first time they called, a person picked up instead of a system. None of that survives a funnel. The funnel is optimized to filter out exactly the unplanned human moment that the good stuff comes from.
“You can't schedule the conversation that changes everything. You can only be reachable when it happens.”
Reachability as a position
Being easy to reach has quietly become a competitive advantage, precisely because everyone else has made themselves hard to reach. When the whole industry hides behind forms and auto-responders, the person who picks up stands out without trying.
I'm not against systems. I use plenty of them. But I won't put one between me and a person who's decided I'm worth a call — because that decision, on their part, is the rarest and most valuable thing in the whole business, and I'm not going to greet it with a menu of options. So the number stays on every page. (269) 832-7470. Try it. Someone answers.
