CommuniZate

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CommuniZate helps businesses fix the systems they run on - service management (ESM/ITSM), CRM, and the processes, people, and leadership behind them.

Practical rebuilds that outlast whoever built them. |communicate |relate |innovate |create

Customer Service and Business Process expert - more than a decade of experience leading, teaching, and growing people. Technology, business, customer service, and leadership consultant, specializing in people, process, communication, and procedure. I can fix your home computer and assist with your technology, but my passion is people and improving communication and process in businesses. I enjoy being able to recognize and cultivate the potential in others, to build leaders and teams, and to encourage continual improvement, growth and engagement. At the core of good leadership and procedure is communication, the ability to relate, an innovative approach and a creative mind.

10/06/2026

I don't consider myself a website creator. I used to dabble in Dreamweaver and I know enough HTML to be effective when writing documentation in the knowledge base systems I've owned.

Over the past 3 months I've either created or been integral in the creation of at least a half-dozen websites. I've handled content, colors, positioning, brand identities, and more. Often without even touching a line of code.

I've never held a position in sales or marketing, but I've helped countless teams and organizations with both over the past several years.

A website is the door your customers enter through, and most organizations have never walked through it the way a customer does.

It's easy to get overwhelmed with 'options' when tackling a website. When those options start to narrow, you realize there's only one path forward. That path might change later, but trusting your gut is usually the best way to break down a creative block. And sometimes, you need to trust the gut of others.

So no, I'm not really a website creator. I help people decide what their door should look like. Then I make sure the copy doesn't sound like AI, because your customers are looking for genuine and your door needs to be trustworthy.

When was the last time you went through your own front door as a customer? Is it time for some cleanup?

09/29/2026

A person on the internet I don't know told me the reason I can't get a job is because I posted on LinkedIn some observations about the hiring process.

It's fascinating the lies we tell ourselves when a system is broken. I'm not sure I've spoken to a person in the last 20 years on either side of the hiring/recruitment process who hasn't admitted that the system is flawed. The flaws are different now than they were 3 years ago for the most part, but the general sentiment remains:

We all know it's not working as well as it could, but we don't know how to fix it, or the fix seems too far beyond us and too unobtainable, because "everyone else is doing it this way" and even if we know "this way" doesn't feel right, when everyone else does it, it feels like "best practice" doesn't it?

Don't let "common practice" overshadow "best practice" - I've witnessed this in multiple positions, industries, roles, and it's always the same thing. Someone did something and it's been "working" and no one wants to change it even though they all know it's broken.

That's where I usually come in, and I immediately become "enemy number one" because I did the thing too many others were afraid to.

I asked "why?"

That's it. That is the actual, real-life, no-exaggeration story of what I've done that has made me the target at so many organizations throughout my career - I asked "why do we do it this way?" and I refuse to take "because that's how we've always done it" as an answer.

Change is uncomfortable. It's challenging. It can fail. But you can't succeed if you're not willing to try. If you don't try, you've already failed.

So maybe my posts are the problem. Or maybe asking why has been the problem all along, and I'm just doing it in public now.

09/25/2026

Inspire one leader to lead their team better, and that's potentially dozens of employees who carry that forward. That's the impact of inspiration.

09/24/2026

I may not know you, but I bet your company has a system issue.

Your HR system isn't bringing in the right applicants.
Your ATS is misreading good candidates.
Your CRM isn't giving sales what they need.
Your internal documentation can't be found.
Your ticketing system isn't serving your IT team the way it should.

None of that is actually a system problem.

I've seen it more times than I can count - an organization has a poor process, buys a shiny new product to fix it, and shoves that same poor process into the shiny new product.

I have asked organizations directly: do you want to be successful, or keep the process you already know is failing you. They picked the process. It happened exactly like I said it would, and I got blamed for it, not the process they chose to keep.

Within 3 years of forcing the shiny new product to look like their old product using the same broken process they started with, everyone hates the system and wants to flush it and start all over again with a newer shinier new product.

It doesn't matter what the tool is called or how much it cost. A new system built on bad process is still a bad process. It just has better UI now. Modern layout. Brighter colors. Dark Mode. Mobile-friendly.

This is where I come in. I fix the process underneath the product, so you stop hating what you did to the product and start loving what the system can actually be.

09/23/2026

I've led teams for 20+ years and I'm good at it. Now I want to help the next generation of leaders be even more effective.

09/22/2026

New video, and it's the widest range you'll see from me in one place - event coverage, systems work, leadership.

This is the reel behind the reels. Everything MjZ does, the editing, the visual storytelling, the work that's supposed to look effortless, started somewhere. This is that somewhere.

Who is Zhem? Watch and find out.

09/17/2026

It might be software you're not using to its full potential. Missing documentation. Docs scattered across a dozen places nobody agreed on. I fix that.

09/10/2026

When a company eliminates a position, they eliminate a person. Those aren't the same math.

On paper, a role is a job description. A tidy list of responsibilities you can hold up against a budget line and make a decision about. I don't know about you, but in every role I've ever held, that job description covers maybe 20% of what I actually did.

The other 80% isn't written down anywhere. It's the process you quietly fixed. The system you're the only one who understands. The relationships across departments that make things move. The emotional management that happens daily. The things no one sees but you do behind the scenes. The institutional memory of why that thing is configured that way. None of it appears on the org chart, so none of it appears in the decision.

So the position gets eliminated and the logic holds up fine. The 80% walks out the door, and the logic was measuring the wrong thing.

I've been through this four times, at four different organizations. Every time, the decision to cut the role made logical sense on paper. And that's partially on me - I create systems and processes so teams can stand on their own without needing a manager to hold their hands. I enable people and I get out of their way. I make things more sustainable and efficient. I make scalable decisions that can grow with us and not hold us back.

What I do stops looking necessary once I've improved how things run. What gets missed is everything else I'm doing after I've made sure my team is set up for success. You cut the "front line IT support manager" and lost the only person holding up the walls that are protecting your entire organization.

I create the systems that enable teams to say "no" when they should and start working holistically, sustainably, and proactively instead of just reactively.

If you're a leader looking at a headcount decision: your people are doing far more than what you hired them to do. Find out what it is before you decide what it's worth.

09/08/2026

Profit is not a purpose.

Revenue is a result of your purpose, not the reason for it. It's the scoreboard, not the game. And you can usually tell which one a company has confused within a sentence of reading their mission statement.

If it reads like "to maximize returns," leave. If it reads like "to serve people," you might be somewhere worth staying.

Revenue follows purpose. It almost never works the other way around, and the companies that forget that tend to find out slowly, then all at once.

09/03/2026

Give the customer regular updates. Even when you have nothing to report.

This is the one I've watched everyone fail at, in every industry I've touched. A ticket comes in, and then... silence. Until there's a solution.

Why? The people drawn to this kind of work are fixers. We don't want to come to you with "I haven't figured it out yet." We want to show up with the answer, wrapped up, solved, so you're happy. So we go quiet until we've got it.

But "no news is good news" right?

No.

Good news is good news. No news is miscommunication.

Almost every customer will understand "here's where we're at, here's what we've tried, we don't have it yet, we're still working on it, here's our next steps" - what they won't forgive is hearing nothing for two weeks and then getting handed a solution like it fell from the sky.

You can solve the ticket perfectly and still leave them unhappy, purely because you went dark getting there.

Follow up. Even with nothing new. It tells them you didn't forget, and that their issue is still yours.

Address

Hudsonville, MI

Website

http://www.communizate.com/

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