Three weeks of looking. Then we build.
Most AI consulting fails the same way: ship a tool, watch nobody use it. We don't have an opinion on the tool until we've watched the day. The first three weeks are diligence. Build starts on week four, on the highest-ROI integration of three we've already ranked together.
Sit at the counter. Read the messages. Watch the day.
A half-day on site. We follow whoever is actually doing the work: front desk, dispatcher, owner answering the phone at 7pm. We read the inbox. We listen to the after-hours voicemails. We open the booking calendar and count the gaps.
The output is a notebook of friction, not a slide deck. Specific moments where time leaks, where a customer falls through a crack, where a number nobody is watching is moving in the wrong direction. We send the notebook to you the same week.
No NDA gate, no procurement song-and-dance. We sign yours if you have one. We don't have ours to push.
Three opportunities, ranked. Each one has a number next to it.
We rank by the only metric your accountant recognizes: money that comes in, hours that go out. Every line item is concrete. The build cost is what it costs us to ship it, the run cost is what your stack costs to keep it running, and the hours-saved came from real numbers we watched in week one.
You read the doc. You push back. We don't have a quota of "AI integrations sold per quarter," which means cutting an opportunity from the list isn't a problem for us. If two of the three are wrong, we go back to the notebook.
The deliverable is one short doc. Three line items. No appendix.
Build the first one. Run it in pilot alongside production.
Highest-ROI integration first. We ship the smallest version that solves the actual problem, and we ship it into production — not a demo, not a sandbox.
For one week the new system runs alongside your existing one. The AI handles half of the after-hours intake. Your old voicemail handles the other half. We watch the diff in real time, on real customers, before it's the only thing you're running.
Edge cases surface here, in the engagement, while we're still paid to fix them. Not on day 17 after we've already moved on to the next shop.
Cutover. Hand off. We can be fired in an afternoon.
Once the pilot is clean, we cut over. Old process retires.
For seven days post-cutover we're reachable for actual breakage — not feature requests, just bugs. Day 7 we hand off: runbooks, accounts in your name, code in a repo you own.
You don't owe us a retainer. You don't depend on our middleware. You can fire us in an afternoon, and we built it that way on purpose.
What happens after the first build.
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return
We come back for the next opportunity on the ranked list. Usually 4–6 weeks after the first ships. Same approach: scoped, numbered, deliverable. cadence · per-engagement, not retainercycle · 2-4w
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handoff
Everything we build is handed off with documentation, runbooks, and the bills in your name. Your stack, your accounts, your ownership. We can be fired in an afternoon. docs · runbooks · ownership in your accountsdeliverable
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no-retainer
We don't do monthly retainers. Every engagement has a fixed scope, fixed price, and a number to hit. If nothing else needs building, we don't invoice for nothing. fixed scope · fixed price · numeric outcometerms