On-site consulting
The Consult.
I come into your business for two to five days, find the hours you lose to work a machine should be doing, and build the things that give those hours back. Custom software, automations, and models running on your own hardware. Then I teach your people to run it, and I stay reachable for a month while real work proves it out.
Running a one-person shop, or three of you? That is a day, not a week, and it is priced like one: the Drop-In, $2,000 to $4,000.
Where I actually stand
I have real worries about AI. I also think you should be using it.
The long view is unsettled
I am not going to pretend otherwise to sell you a week of my time. The long-term picture is genuinely unsettled, and anyone who tells you they know how it lands is guessing.
- What it does to entry-level work
- What happens when models get cheap enough to run everywhere
- Who ends up owning the infrastructure
Where I actually stand
I have real worries about AI. I also think you should be using it.
The narrow part I am sure about
For the repetitive, structured, joyless work that eats a small business alive, there is nothing better available right now. Not close. That narrow part is the only part I sell.
- Copying a lead into four systems
- Rebuilding the same report every Monday
- Chasing a status update across three inboxes
Where I actually stand
I have real worries about AI. I also think you should be using it.
And where it does not help
Not a strategy deck about transformation. The specific tasks in your specific week that a machine should be doing, with a human still holding every decision that matters.
- Where it does not help, I say so and we skip it
- Nothing runs unsupervised on day one
- Your data does not have to leave the building
A worked example
One lead, typed in five times.
Today
The form email arrives. Someone creates the contact in the CRM, then the spreadsheet, then the calendar invite, then a message to whoever covers that region. Three days later nobody is sure which copy is right.
- Eight to twelve minutes of typing per lead
- Twenty leads a week is about four hours
- Two of the five copies disagree by Thursday
A worked example
One lead, typed in five times.
After the week
The same email lands in the same inbox. A job on your server reads it, pulls the fields, checks for a duplicate, and writes all five. A person still approves anything unusual: an unfamiliar company name, a duplicate that is not quite a duplicate.
- It runs in about four seconds
- Nothing in this diagram leaves your building
- The person sees the exceptions, not the typing
You get one name typed once, landing everywhere
The parts, in plain English
Four words worth knowing before anyone sells you something.
The harness
A model on its own only writes text. The harness is everything around it: what it may see, which tools it can use, what it must do before it acts, and what happens when it gets something wrong.
- It has to be built for your business
- Nearly all the value lives here
- Swap the model out, keep the harness
You get the harness, still yours when the model changes
The parts, in plain English
Four words worth knowing before anyone sells you something.
RAG, or how it knows anything about you
Instead of training a model on your business, you leave your documents where they are. When a question arrives, the few passages that actually matter get found and handed to the model with it.
- It can cite the document it used
- Updating its knowledge is updating a file
- Only the relevant passages get sent, so costs stay sane
You get answers that cite your own files
The parts, in plain English
Four words worth knowing before anyone sells you something.
Agentic workflows, and the boring cousin
An agentic workflow takes steps: read this, decide, call that tool, check the result, try again. A lot of what saves real time is duller: a scheduled job on your own machine, doing the same reliable thing every morning.
- The clever thing when the problem needs it
- The boring cron when the cron is better
- It bothers a person only when something looks off
You get decisions waiting for you, not data entry
The parts, in plain English
Four words worth knowing before anyone sells you something.
On-premises inference
The model runs on a machine you own. Something small enough for one off-the-shelf GPU can classify an email, pull fields out of a document, or check one list against another, all day, at no marginal cost.
- Client records never leave your network
- No per-token bill that grows with your success
- A seven billion parameter model wants about eight gigabytes
You get the routing rule, and you own it
The kit
You pick the model. You keep the harness.
Nothing here is proprietary to me, and that is deliberate. Every piece is either open, or something you can hold an account for directly. If we part ways, none of it stops working.
What the days look like
One to five days, in your office.
Day one: watch, and write it down
Day one is not a survey. I sit next to the person doing the work and time the actual clicks, because what people say a task costs and what it costs are two different numbers.
- Two days is the minimum, five is a full week
- On a two-day visit the days compress, they do not get skipped
- I say which ones are not worth automating
You get a ranked list of every repeated task, with hours on it
What the days look like
One to five days, in your office.
Days two to four: wire it, build it, teach it
The first job runs on real data in draft mode before anyone trusts it, and it is usually the lead flow, because the lead flow is usually the worst one. Then the custom pieces, then your people.
- Draft mode first, always
- Written as code you own, on your hardware
- If they cannot run it without me, I have not finished
You get a system your team is already using by Friday afternoon
What the days look like
One to five days, in your office.
Day five: harden it and hand it over
The last day is about what happens when something breaks and I am not there. Written failure modes, backups somebody has actually tested, and a record another developer could pick up.
- The guardrails agreed out loud
- Everything built during the week is yours outright
- The next step, whether or not it involves me
You get the documentation, and the list of what comes next
What the days look like
One to five days, in your office.
The thirty days after
Nothing survives first contact with a live week untouched. For thirty days after the visit I am reachable and I tune it, because a system that gets abandoned in week two was never worth building.
- Included in the fee, not an upsell
- Thirty days against a real week
- Autonomy is earned by being right first
You get thirty days of tuning against real work, included
What it is worth
Do the arithmetic yourself.
I am not going to quote you a case study with a made-up percentage on it. Here is the only calculation that matters, and you can run it on your own numbers in about a minute.
Take one task your team repeats. Multiply the minutes by how often it happens by how many people do it. Multiply that by a loaded hourly cost. That is the annual number sitting in one habit, and most businesses I walk into have four or five of them running at once.
One habit usually pays for the week. The rest is upside, and it keeps compounding, because the tools underneath get faster and cheaper every quarter while your harness stays the same.
Where this ends up
Some of these stop being tools and start being staff.
What arrives
The honest framing: not a replacement for your people, a replacement for the part of their week they resent. Email, forms and files, arriving in the same shapes they arrived in yesterday.
- A script saves you an afternoon
- A role with a schedule saves you a position
- It does not leave and take the process knowledge with it
Where this ends up
Some of these stop being tools and start being staff.
The job description
It has a job description now, which is what makes it a role and not a script. The scope is written down, it does not drift, and anyone on your team can read it and change it.
- Two in the morning, and the Friday before a holiday
- It does not get bored on the four hundredth record
- No raise, no holiday, no handover
Where this ends up
Some of these stop being tools and start being staff.
Handled, or escalated
Once it has been right for a few weeks you stop reviewing every action and start reviewing the exceptions. That is the moment it changes category.
- The ninety percent, handled and logged
- The rest, escalated with the context attached
- Your team deciding, not typing
- No headline number from me: yours depends on your week
You get a standing role that runs around the clock
If you are small
The Drop-In: One day, for one person or a few
The Consult is priced for a team of about ten or more, because that is how many processes there are to untangle. If you are one person, or three, you do not need a week of me and I am not going to sell you one. A day gets the time audit, the worst job in your week automated properly, and you trained to run it. Same approach, same ownership, sized to what you actually have.
$2,000 to $4,000
One day on site or remote · 2 weeks of refinement · one-time fee
One day on site, or two remote sessions if travel makes no sense for the size of the problem. Same method as the week, at a scale that fits a practice of one to five.
We list the jobs that eat your week and put hours next to each. By lunch you know which three matter, and which one to hand to software first.
I build one or two of those automations before the day ends and leave them running in your accounts. Small, finished, and yours, rather than a plan for later.
A straight read on your subscriptions and vendors: what earns its keep, what to cancel, and what a cheaper or simpler tool would do just as well.
Two weeks of refinement after the visit, once the automations have met real work. Questions answered, rough edges fixed, no new invoice.
Everything built stays in your name: the code, the accounts, the notes from the day.
If the audit shows that a week would genuinely change the business more than a day, I say so, with the number, and leave the decision with you.
The The Consult is priced for a team of about ten or more, because that is roughly where the number of processes, handoffs and systems makes a week worth it. I would rather size the engagement honestly than sell you the bigger one.
On site · The Consult
$8,000 to $20,000
Two to five days on site · 30 days of refinement · for teams of about ten or more
One fee, once. Not a retainer, not a seat licence, nothing to cancel later. Everything built during the week is yours outright: the code, the accounts, the documentation.
I come to you. The first morning is spent watching how work actually moves: who opens what, what gets retyped, where a request waits. The plan for the rest of the visit is written from that, not from a questionnaire.
Every recurring job gets a name, an owner, and a number of hours a week. The ones a machine can do are marked. You see the whole week on one page before anything is built, so the order of work is your call.
The tools get built on site, in your accounts, with your data, while the people who will use them are in the room. A dashboard, an intake flow, a report that used to take a morning: working by the time I leave, not scoped for a later quote.
Your CRM, calendar, mail, forms, and whatever else you already pay for get wired to each other so a name typed once lands everywhere it belongs. Nothing gets replaced that does not need replacing.
Training happens on the real queue, not a sample file. I sit with the person who does the job until they can run the new version without me, and I write the steps down in their words.
The code, the accounts, the logins, the documentation: all in your name before I leave. There is no dependency on me afterwards unless you want one.
For thirty days after the visit the work runs through real weeks and I fix what those weeks find. Questions get answered the same day; adjustments ship without a new invoice.
One fee for the engagement, agreed before I book travel. No retainer, no seat licence, no subscription hidden inside the tools. If you want me back, that is a new conversation, not an auto-renewal.