Andrew Underhill spent years leading large teams inside the tech industry. He walked away to build custom vans by hand. That is not a mid-life crisis story. It is a calculated read on where the work is heading, and a decision to get ahead of it rather than wait to be caught out.
His reasoning is worth sitting with, because most people are drawing the opposite conclusion from the same evidence. Andrew watched AI start to compress the kind of knowledge work he had built a career on, and instead of trying to out-run it, he moved toward work that is hard to automate: physical craft, custom builds, the sort of thing a machine cannot ship. He founded Emery Custom Builds around exactly that bet.
The twist is that he did not turn his back on the technology. He put it to work for the parts of the business that were slowing him down. This episode is a clear look at how a tradesperson can use AI as an operations engine while the value he sells stays firmly in human hands.
Why he bet against his own industry
Andrew was not sitting on the sidelines guessing about AI. He led large teams inside Big Tech, close enough to the shift to see how quickly it was moving. That vantage point is what makes his decision interesting. He was not reacting to a headline. He was reacting to what he could see happening to the work itself.
His conclusion was blunt. A lot of knowledge work is going to get faster, cheaper, and more automated, and the people doing it will feel that pressure sooner than they expect. Rather than compete for a shrinking share of that work, he chose a category where the human is the product. Someone still has to measure the space, cut the timber, and fit the build to the person who ordered it.
For a small business owner, the useful question here is not “should I quit and take up a trade.” It is “which parts of what I sell are actually protected.” Andrew’s answer was to move his core value toward craftsmanship, then let the technology handle everything around it. That separation between the work that must stay human and the work that can be handed off is the real lesson.
Custom builds as a hedge, not a hobby
Emery Custom Builds was started from nothing. There was no existing client book, no brand, no back catalogue of jobs. Andrew built the company the same way he builds a van: one piece at a time, from the ground up.
What makes the choice deliberate rather than romantic is the resilience angle. A custom build is bought by a specific person for a specific purpose, and it is finished by hand. That is a difficult thing to commoditise. When Andrew talks about building a business designed for the age of AI, he means picking a product where the value cannot be copied and pasted, then charging for the skill and judgement that go into it.
Plenty of service businesses have a version of this hiding inside them. The consultant whose real value is the read on a client’s situation, not the slide deck. The designer whose taste matters more than the file. Andrew’s framing is a prompt to find that irreplaceable part of your own offer and put more weight on it, while stripping the automatable admin off the top.
Using Claude to do the work of a back office he does not have
Here is where the story stops being about vans. A one-person custom build business does not come with a marketing department, an SEO specialist, or an operations manager. Andrew uses Claude AI to fill those seats.
He put it on the two jobs that quietly sink most tradespeople. The first is being found online. Andrew uses Claude to improve his website SEO so that customers searching for a custom builder can actually land on Emery Custom Builds rather than a competitor with a bigger budget. The second is the running of the business itself, the operational load that eats the evenings after the tools are down.
This is the pattern small business owners should copy. The AI is not making the thing being sold. Andrew still builds the van. What the AI does is remove the drag: writing and structuring the site so search engines understand it, tightening up the systems, and freeing hours that would otherwise disappear into admin. The human keeps the craft. The machine takes the paperwork.
Practical ways to point AI at the boring parts
The version of AI-for-business that gets sold to small owners is usually the wrong one. It is presented as a way to churn out more content faster, which mostly produces more mediocre content faster. Andrew’s use is narrower and more sensible: aim it at the tasks that have a clear right answer and no emotional value to you.
SEO is a good example because it rewards structure. Getting a site to explain clearly what you do, who you serve, and where you work is unglamorous, technical, and easy to put off for a year. It is also exactly the kind of task where a tool like Claude earns its keep, because you can describe your business in plain language and get help turning that into pages a search engine can read. For a builder whose competitive edge is in the workshop, that is time bought back.
The same logic applies to operations. Quoting templates, follow-up sequences, standard responses to common questions, the scaffolding of a business that would otherwise live in your head. None of it is the reason a customer hires Andrew, and all of it can be systematised with help. The discipline is knowing the line. Automate the parts nobody is paying you for. Protect the parts they are.
Building the business around the life, not the other way round
Andrew is explicit that Emery Custom Builds was designed around family and freedom before it was designed around growth. That is a different starting point from most business advice, which treats the company as the goal and the life as the leftover.
The AI decision and the family decision are connected. By handing the administrative load to tools that do it cheaply, a solo operator can keep the business small and profitable without drowning in unpaid hours. Resilience, in Andrew’s telling, is not just about picking work that AI cannot do. It is about structuring the whole thing so it supports the people it is meant to support, including him and his community.
That is the quieter takeaway for anyone in their first few years of business. The tools now exist to run lean without running yourself into the ground. Andrew has built a company where the human does the human work, the software does the rest, and the point of the exercise is a life he actually wants. Worth watching the full conversation for how he thinks through the trade-offs.
About Andrew Underhill
Andrew Underhill is the founder of Emery Custom Builds, a company creating custom spaces built by hand. After leading large teams in the tech industry, he left the corporate world to build a business designed around craftsmanship, family, and long-term resilience in the age of AI. He uses Claude AI to improve his website SEO and streamline his operations.
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