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⚙ Hi {{first_name_tally|Operator}} - Rameel here.
I made a video! Or read below to see whats going on.
You probably haven't heard from me in a few weeks. Honestly, it's been closer to four months since I've really been running The Bottleneck the way I used to. I've been dabbling here and there, but that's about it.
Part of it is that I had my second daughter on January 31, so I've got two kids under two now (which is amazing and absolute chaos).
But the bigger reason is that I genuinely don't know what to do with this newsletter anymore, and I figured the most honest thing to do was just say that out loud and ask for your help figuring it out.
So let me give you some context.
About a year ago, I got a pretty random inbound offer. An old connection from my first company — which was in fuel logistics, picking up from terminals and distributing to gas stations — reached out and asked if I wanted to come in and operate twelve gas stations they could not manage.
At the time, The Bottleneck was my full-time thing. But I didn't really see a reason not to.
That turned out to be a “fun” decision.
(shoutout to the driver who drove into a Circle K I took over in my first week)
Over the past year, I've grown that portfolio to ~50 gas stations across Texas, New Mexico, and Oklahoma.
A lot of them came in as distressed assets (I’m talkin’ really, really run down) so I was stepping in as the operator, funneling cash in, and basically rebuilding them from the inside out.
And something I kept noticing while I was deep in those businesses was that one of the most expensive things I was buying for these stations was signage. I'm talking tens of thousands of dollars at a time.
I couldn't really figure out why they cost so much, so I started pulling on the thread.
One thing led to another, and that's how the sign business started.
We launched Houston Sign Crafters back in October of 2025 (so about six months ago now) and it's actually been doing really well.
Besides making signs for my own gas stations, we've been doing signage for other companies too: storefront signs, monument signs, the whole thing. As of now, we're at around $100k/month in revenue and seem to be on track to double in April.
(Our very first sign we made 🙂 )
And then, because I still have that tech-forward side of my brain, I started turning a lot of the learnings and tools I was building in-house, mostly around growth and operations, into this little agency / consulting thing.
The fancier way to say it is an AI-native agency for local businesses, manufacturers, and industrial companies. I’ve been basically productizing what I’ve learned from the sign business into tools other local businesses can use.
So that's what I've been doing the past several months, on top of the new baby.
Which is why The Bottleneck has been on the back burner. And frankly, even though all three of these are very operationally heavy businesses, I don’t know if I’m really a COO anymore.
I'm closer to President / super generalist / co-founder / operator across a few things: a retail operations business, a manufacturing business, and an AI-native agency.
Things are going really well. Don't get me wrong.
But it does leave The Bottleneck kind of sitting in the background, which honestly sucks, because I've put almost three years of time and effort into this thing and I'd hate to see it go to waste.
So here's where I'm stuck.
I'm trying to figure out what to do with the newsletter.
Do I keep writing it, but make it more of a personal blog or journal situation aka field notes from what I'm building?
Do I hand it off to someone who wants to take it somewhere new? (I actually tried selling it a while back. That's a whole different spiel, and it didn't work out.)
Do I let it sit?
I don't really know yet. That's the honest answer.
What I do know is that I'm going to keep growing the gas station portfolio, keep building the sign business, and keep working on the AI-native agency for local businesses and manufacturers. I gotta keep building. That part isn't changing.
The Bottleneck is the open question.
So… I'd actually love to hear from you on this one.
What would you want this to be?
Would you read field notes from building three very different businesses?
Would you rather see me hand the keys to someone else?
Am I overthinking it and should just keep writing?
Hit reply and let me know. I read everything.
More soon (I hope).
— Rameel
P.S if you don’t hear from me again, its cause I got crushed by a sign or a gas truck or a bot