I Took a Sabbatical to Rest. AI Changed Everything.

I thought my sabbatical was going to be rest.

And for a while, it was. I slept past 6am, walked my dog, dabbled in gardening, took care of my health in a way I had never really let myself before, and spent long afternoons with friends I hadn't seen in years. I found myself helping people too, former peers, my daughter, her new grad friends, talk through what they wanted next. It all felt smaller, quieter, and honestly, really good.

Then something shifted.

The tenants moved out of a condo I owned, and suddenly I had a real project on my hands. I renovated it, mostly with my own hands and my daughter's, and because I finally had the time, I did something I had been putting off for years. I forced myself to actually learn AI. Not just surface-level ChatGPT, but how to build with it, automations, systems, and tools I had not touched before.

It was uncomfortable. But I had a real problem to solve. How do you run a student rental property without it consuming your life, and without a team to hand it to? So I built the answer.

Here's what I see now that I didn't before: AI isn't just a productivity tool. It's a force multiplier for people who already know how to operate. One person with deep domain expertise and a willingness to learn can now build, run, and scale things that used to require a whole team. Most people haven't felt that yet. I have.

That condo became a laboratory. The laboratory became a business. And as I got better at what I was building, that business expanded into other income properties.

At the same time, the lunches kept happening. A former colleague became one of my closest friends, and without either of us planning it, we started pushing each other. Staying relevant. Staying ahead. We both believed that AI, and learning how to humanize the way we work with it, was going to be the differentiator. We were not formally working. But we were doing some of the sharpest thinking of our careers.

Other colleagues started showing up to those conversations too. Revenue challenges, scaling issues, teams that were not quite working. I kept finding myself doing more than just listening. I was diagnosing, pressure testing, and helping solve in real time.

That pattern had a name. I just had not called it that yet. That became Vellara Strategies.

And then I started bumping into people. Former colleagues who were consulting on the side, building something in between jobs, or doing work they actually loved in what they called retirement. We compared notes. We all worried about AI. We learned together. We shared leads and expertise. And eventually I stopped thinking of it as a network and started thinking of it as a partnership.

That became a third business. One I did not see coming, and the one that has surprised me the most.

Three businesses. No formal plan. Just a year of paying attention to what pulled me in, and being willing to get uncomfortable enough to follow it.

Most people think a sabbatical is about stepping away. For me, it turned into building something entirely different.

Next: what I am choosing to do with all of this, and why I am being deliberate about what comes next.