Micah Burgess

I did not start in web design. I started buying houses.

I grew up in Omaha, spent two years in London, and finished growing up outside Chicago, where wrestling took over my life from middle school on. I qualified for high school nationals twice for Illinois. Out of school I sold Cutco knives door to door for a couple of summers, then went to Nebraska to study business, and left after a year, because every professor teaching me business had never run one. The mentor I met there had, and he taught me real estate instead.

Going into what would have been my sophomore year, I bought my first house, filled it with roommates, and it paid for itself. Then I flipped houses across Nebraska, about a dozen of them, everything from a 1906 build to 1970s ranches, and picked up rentals in Austin along the way. In 2022 I moved to Austin for good, bought into a national lawn care franchise, bought my first commercial building, and spent the next four years running a real service business: quoting jobs, chasing leads, following up at night, and wondering why a good company was so hard for new customers to find.

That business is where Summit Oak AI comes from. Running it taught me the three questions every service business owner is actually asking, and they became the only three questions I work on:

Can we increase revenue? Can we cut the manual hours? Can we eliminate the errors?

Today I build websites made to be found and cited, by Google and by the AI assistants people increasingly ask instead of Google, and the CRM and workflow automation systems behind them. My clients are mostly home and local service businesses, plus real estate and some e-commerce. The work gets measured against those three questions. A garage floor company that ranked number one on Google and still got three inquiries a month now gets multiple every day. An industrial chiller company in Idaho closes deals from in state and out of state buyers who found it through ChatGPT. A veteran lodging agency got six to eight hours a day of manual flyer-building handed back to its team, and the errors that came with rebuilding those flyers by hand went with it. The full stories are on the case studies page, in the clients' own words.

Wrestling teaches you the thing this work runs on: nobody is coming to do the reps for you, and the result on the mat is just the reps made visible. I bring the same approach to every build: verify everything, publish nothing that is not true, and measure the outcome instead of admiring the effort.

I live in Austin. If you want to know whether your business is visible to the machines your customers ask, that is a conversation I have every week, and the first look is a scan, not a pitch.