The Graveyard Gap

In 2019, I hired an illustrator to give me drawing lessons. I figured if I could draw simple characters and diagrams, I could build more of a “world” around the things I was putting out.

Last week someone asked who did the watercolour illustrations on a client’s website.

I did. With AI. Seven years between hiring someone to teach me, and an AI outpainting anything those lessons could’ve produced.

The Graveyard Gap is the space between what you know you should be doing and what you actually do. Every restaurant owner I know carries it around. The website that still shows last summer’s menu. The private event inquiry they forgot to call back. The Google listing with the wrong hours on it. They’ve known about all of it. Some of it for years.

Good instincts, good intentions — all of it just sitting there because there’s no time, no team, no budget. For most of the history of running a small business, that was just how it was.

We’re so early.

The restaurants I’m watching get busier from this — they’re not cutting staff. They’re hiring. A busier restaurant needs more people running it.

I don’t have this fully worked out yet. But that list you carry around — the one with all the things you know you should be doing — I think the cost of actually doing them just changed.