The Engineer-CEO Dilemma: Why Building the Product and Running the Business Is Actually a Superpower

When people find out that Ajax Custom Guitars is a one-person operation — that the same person who designs the PCBs, dials in the print settings, and assembles every build also handles the pricing, the affiliate agreements, the Shopify listings, and the customer emails — the reaction is usually some version of: how do you do that?

The honest answer is that I built the business this way on purpose. Not because it's easy, but because for me, it's the right fit. And the longer I run it, the more I think the engineer-CEO combination isn't a compromise. It's an advantage.

Why I Built It This Way

A few years ago, I was navigating some real health challenges. Managing energy became a meaningful part of my daily life — knowing when I had capacity for deep focus, when I needed to work at a lighter pace, and how to structure an environment that supported me rather than worked against me.

A conventional job, with its fixed hours, open offices, and someone else's schedule, wasn't a sustainable fit. So I built something that was.

Ajax Custom Guitars was designed around flexibility from day one. I control the pace. I control the environment — air quality, lighting, ergonomics, noise. I control when I do deep technical work and when I handle business tasks. That's not a luxury. For me, it's the architecture that makes everything else possible.

The Full-Stack Advantage

When you're the person who designed the PCB, dialed in the tolerances, and also built the listing, set the price, and answered the support email — you understand your product at every layer. There's no translation loss between what was built and what's being sold.

That matters more than people realize. I've caught product issues mid-customer-conversation that no QA checklist would have surfaced, because I knew exactly how the part was made and what failure mode they were describing. I've made packaging decisions faster because I understand the mechanical reality of what's inside the box. I've priced builds more accurately because I know what actually goes into them — not just materials cost, but hours, iteration, and the specific decisions that make one build different from another.

Full-stack knowledge compounds. At 200+ units with a 0% return rate, I'd argue it's one of the biggest factors in why that number looks the way it does.

Context Switching as a Skill, Not a Liability

Yes, going from a KiCad session to writing an affiliate agreement is a gear shift. Deep technical work and business operations use different parts of your brain, and switching between them has a cost.

But I've come to think of that context switching as a skill in itself — one I've gotten better at over time. Knowing when to close the CAD file and handle the business task that actually needs to move today. Knowing when to protect a technical work block because the problem I'm solving will pay off downstream. Knowing the difference between a rabbit hole worth going down and one that's just engineer brain avoiding a spreadsheet.

Managing capacity — mental, physical, creative — is something I think about carefully because I have to. And it turns out that discipline makes you a better operator, not just a more sustainable one.

When the Two Brains Work Together

The best moments in running this business are when the engineer and the CEO are solving the same problem.

Designing a Revamp Kit that's genuinely better than what the market offered — that's engineering. Pricing it, positioning it, launching it with content that explains why it's better — that's business. But the reason the marketing is credible is because the engineering is real. And the reason the engineering goes in the right direction is because the business feedback tells me what players actually need.

Together, they build something that holds up.

The Identity Question

Am I an engineer who sells, or a business owner who builds?

Honestly, I've stopped trying to answer that cleanly. Ajax Custom Guitars exists because I cared about the product first — I started building because the options in the market weren't good enough. The engineering identity came first, and it still drives the work.

But running a real business has shaped me in ways I didn't expect. I think more clearly about what moves the needle. I've gotten more honest about when perfect is the enemy of shipped. I've learned that the best build in the world doesn't matter if it never reaches the person who needs it.

The dilemma in the title is real. But so is the resolution: these two roles, in the same hands, with the right structure around them, make each other better.

That's why I wouldn't have it any other way.