Advisory
An AI operator in your corner, on a standing arrangement.
For owners who would rather make the decision once a week than read another vendor deck. The decisions get made, the small things get built, and the tools that do not deserve your money get named.
Most owner-led businesses use AI to draft emails and nothing else.
Not because the owners are behind, but because every hour spent evaluating tools is an hour not spent running the business. So the tools pile up unread, the pitches keep arriving, and the admin that prompted the search in the first place carries on eating the week.
The gap is rarely technology. It is that nobody whose job it is to decide has actually looked at how the work gets done.
Weekly decisions, not another deck.
Weekly decision call
Forty-five minutes, screen shared, on whatever is actually in front of you this week. Not a status update.
A direct line between calls
One channel, answered inside a business day. Most decisions do not survive a week of waiting.
A written baseline by day thirty
Where the hours go, which parts of the business depend on you personally, and what each one costs a month in your own numbers.
Build-or-buy verdicts
Before anything gets signed. Most of the time the answer is buy something small, and sometimes it is do nothing.
Vendor checks
Send over the pitch that landed in your inbox and get a straight read on whether it does what it claims.
A quarterly reset
What shipped, what it returned, and what the next quarter should be pointed at.
The first ninety days.
Nothing ambitious happens in month one. The baseline has to exist before anything built on top of it is worth trusting.
Day 0
The call
Forty-five minutes on how the work gets done today. No recommendations in this one, deliberately.
Days 1–30
The baseline
A written map of where the hours go and which parts of the business only work because you show up.
Days 31–90
Shipping
Two or three workflows live. Smallest first, so something is working before anything ambitious is attempted.
Day 90
The reset
What was returned in hours and dollars, and an honest call on whether this should continue.
This fits you if
You own or run the business. Decisions do not need a committee. There is real repetitive work, done by real people, that nobody has ever written down properly. And you would rather be told the truth about a tool than sold one.
This is not for you if
What you want is a course, a workshop, or a transformation deck. Or if the goal is to say the word AI in a pitch rather than get an hour back. Those are real needs. They are just someone else's.
Scope and price are set on the call, against what the engagement is expected to return rather than by the hour.
The questions worth asking before signing anything.
How is this different from hiring someone?
A full-time operations hire is a salary, a desk, and a training period before anything ships. This is a standing call and a person who has already done the work elsewhere. When the need becomes big enough to hire for, you will know, and that is a good outcome.
How is it different from an agency or a staffing firm?
Staffing firms will sell you an assistant at roughly $1,400 a month per seat, then leave you to write the instructions that assistant follows. Writing those instructions properly is the actual work. This engagement builds the system first, and it works whether the person running it is a hire, a contractor, or software.
What happens in the first ninety days?
A written baseline inside the first month, then two or three things live by day ninety. Small ones first. A business that has never shipped an automation should not start with the hardest one.
How much time does it take from you?
Forty-five minutes on the call, plus whatever you spend answering questions between them. If it needs more of your week than that, something has been scoped wrong.
Does the business need to be big?
No, but it needs to be past the point where the owner does everything alone. Somewhere between two and twenty staff is where this tends to pay for itself fastest.
What if the honest answer is that nothing needs fixing?
Then you get told that. A diagnostic that always finds a problem is a sales instrument. Some businesses are running well and should be left alone.
Who owns what gets built?
You do. Accounts in your name, on your card, with your own off switch. Nothing is set up in a way that quietly requires anyone to keep existing.
Start with the free version.
The Operating Map asks the same seven questions the paid baseline starts from. Fill it in and the first call begins at the useful part.