A Letter to the People Who Run Distributed Work

When people hear "distributed work," they picture remote teams. I mean something bigger: any time two or more companies work toward a common goal. A franchisor and its franchise owners. A manufacturer and its dealers. A brand and its agency. An association and its members.

Work used to be organized by company. More and more, it's organized by goal, and I believe that shift is just getting started. AI lets a small team do what used to take a department, so I expect to see more small companies and specialized teams, each doing what it does best and working with others to get the bigger job done. But most work tools still assume everyone sits inside one company, with one org chart, one login and one set of files.

Each company has its own people, its own tools and its own way of doing things. The goal is shared, but the knowledge isn't. What one location figures out on a Tuesday rarely reaches the location that hits the same problem on Friday. Most of the friction in distributed work comes from that gap, not from a lack of effort.

I've spent my career on both sides of that gap.

I started my career in franchise software, building local listing management programs and software that managed ad spend efficiently across thousands of locations. That work showed me the data challenges franchise brands face, and how powerful shared context can be when it's used correctly.

I bought Oxi Fresh, Pool Scouts, Home Clean Heroes and Cherry Blow Dry Bar franchises because I wanted to be in business for myself, but not by myself. I quickly learned how little knowledge was shared across the network. I usually knew the answer to my problem existed somewhere. Another owner had already solved it, or someone at corporate had written it down. The hard part was finding it. More often than I'd like to admit, I gave up looking and figured it out on my own.

After owning franchises, I went back to building software, this time data warehouses and scorecards for franchisors.

I also serve on the Board of the U.S. Lavender Growers Association and lead its Technology Committee. I see the same thing there. Members do better when what one of them learns reaches all of them.

The people building Cozee come from very different places. Between us, we've redesigned how franchise brands bring on new owners, worked at the White House managing the distribution of COVID testing kits, trained in medicine, built data warehouses for franchise networks, and built financial software that pulls information from many companies into one investment view.

Those don't sound like the same job, but we all ran into the same problem. Each one involved separate people working toward one goal, and each one depended on getting what one person knew to the next person who needed it. A patient's history has to follow the patient. A candidate's story has to reach whoever makes the call. A test kit has to get where it's needed. When the context doesn't move, the work slows down, mistakes creep in and people end up solving the same problem twice.

That isn't a franchise problem or a healthcare problem. It's a human problem, and it's as old as working together.

AI raises the stakes. Now most of us use AI tools, and each one only sees what that person gives it. When knowledge is scattered, AI gives partial answers faster than ever. Buying more AI on top of a mess of tools just adds complexity. The logical order is to get your context into one place first, permissioned by role, and then connect AI.

Most work tools are built around a company. Cozee is built around a shared goal. A franchisor and its owners are separate companies working toward the same thing, and today they run their comms and their work in one Cozee workspace. Cozee answers from the brand's own documents and shows its sources. It learns from everyone's chats and tasks, so it gets sharper with use.

The same need shows up anywhere teams or companies share a goal. Where we're headed is a Cozee where any group working toward a common goal can share context, each side controls what it shares, and every AI tool the group approves works from the same picture.

When I owned franchises, figuring things out alone felt like part of the job. It doesn't have to be anymore. When people who share a goal also share their context, the answer one person finds becomes everyone's answer.

You can start with as few as two users, month to month, at Cozee.