How we work together
No retainer, no discovery funnel, and no talking you into work that isn't there. Four stages, and you can stop after any of them.
The lifecycle
Launched systems drift, so keeping them running feeds back into scope. That is the loop I stay in.
The four stages
Every stage ends in something you can hold: a diagnosis, a scope, a number, or working software. You never get a deck.
Half this job is being a therapist. You tell me what hurts: quoting eats three days, the forecast is never right, nobody touches the AI tools we bought. My work is getting from that symptom to the root cause, because fixing the symptom just moves it somewhere else.
All of it: what you do day to day, what systems you're on, how the data moves between them, where the handoffs break. If you already know which pains to point me at, this goes faster. If you don't, I'm still going to find what needs fixing.
What it takes to hand this to AI, written in plain language, with cost and timing attached. If you like it, we go. If you don't, we don't. No retainer, and no talking you into work that isn't there.
Every week you see working software. Something runs by week two. After two rounds of changes it ships and goes live against your real work. I stay on after launch, because APIs change and data drifts.
A worked example
Before anything gets built, I map how a quote gets built today. Which systems hold your pricing, who has to approve the number, where it sits for two days waiting on someone, what that costs you in hours.
Then you get a feasibility proposal for handing that to AI, with the number and the timeline on it. You decide from there.
If the honest answer is that the build saves you four hours a month and costs more than that to maintain, that is what the proposal says. I would rather lose the build than sell you one that quietly becomes your problem in six months.
Start here
Half this job is being a therapist. Tell me what hurts and we start at stage one.