Twenty-one years as an operator. Now applying it to AI for small businesses.

An operator who learned AI deeply, not an AI person who learned about your business yesterday.

Dane spent 21 years inside K-12 organizations. Thirteen years as a classroom teacher building courses around emerging tech. Six years as Virtual Learning Academy Coordinator, scaling an online learning operation from 100 students to 1,000 across the pandemic and the years after. Two years as a building principal, where he led a documented turnaround.

That turnaround is the relevant proof point for AI work. In 15 months, his staff went from 0% awareness of AI tools to 86% daily active usage. Test scores rose 18%. Failure rates dropped 67%. The building moved from the bottom 5% of state ranking to mid-level standing. AI wasn't the only lever, but it was a core one, and the structured change management behind it transfers directly to small business contexts.

Why the move to small business consulting.

In 2025, Dane and his family relocated to Taylors, SC, just outside Greenville. Palmetto Group AI launched the same year. The original positioning was K-12 AI consulting, since that's where his operating experience came from. The pivot to small business came from conversations: most of the people asking him for help weren't school administrators, they were small business owners, founders, and operations leaders trying to figure out what to do about AI in their own work.

The skills transfer. The frameworks transfer. The audience changed.

Twenty-one years of relevant operator work.

Before the principalship, Dane spent six years as Virtual Learning Academy Coordinator, where the operation grew 10x in users while he redesigned the technology stack, hiring pipeline, and operating model. That kind of scaling work is unusually close to what most growing small businesses need to figure out about AI: when to automate, what to train people on, which tools to consolidate, and how to keep quality up as volume grows.

Before that, 13 years as a classroom teacher across business, computing, history, and communication. The MBA work happened in the middle of all of it. The Dogwood Company LLC was Dane's first stab at a non-education business venture, run from 2017 to 2022.

What Palmetto Group AI does, and why.

There are three reasons most AI initiatives in small businesses stall: (1) nobody actually defines what success looks like, (2) the training is too generic to change behavior, (3) nobody owns the rollout six months after the kickoff meeting. Palmetto Group AI exists to address all three.

The work is built around what Dane learned doing it the first time at scale: that adoption follows utility, not enthusiasm. That structured training beats charismatic keynotes every time. That tools matter less than the systems wrapped around them. And that small businesses, like schools, mostly fail at new tech because nobody made it easy enough to keep using.

If your business is past the "what is ChatGPT" phase and into the "what should we actually do" phase, we should probably talk.