Questions People Actually Ask

Less than you think, because that's the design constraint - you're busy, or you wouldn't need automation. The 3-day audit needs about an hour of interview time from you and a key staffer. The 2-week audit needs 2-4 hours of interviews spread across your team, plus a 60-minute walkthrough at the end. A build needs a kickoff call, a few quick approvals along the way, and a handoff walkthrough.

I do the work. Your job is to tell me where it hurts and approve what goes out the door.

The fee is fixed and quoted up front - no hourly meter, no surprise invoices. Beyond my fee, there are two honest line items to know about:

The AI tools themselves. You'll own a subscription to the AI service your agent runs on - typically $20 to $200 a month depending on usage. In my own company, that's regularly less than the subscriptions the automation let us cancel.

Maintenance. Optional. Everything I build is documented so any developer could maintain it - that's a deliverable, not a promise. If you'd rather I keep it healthy and growing, that's a monthly retainer we scope together after the build works.

And remember: audit fees credit in full toward the first build, and the audit is money-back guaranteed.

Fair question - "AI consultant" has gotten crowded with people who have never run anything. Here's my paper trail: I'm the cofounder of Dementia Success Path, a real education company serving dementia caregivers. Every system on the case studies page runs my own business today, the dashboard demo is a real tool my cofounder and I use, and you can check me out on LinkedIn.

I've even been in a few of our business' skits, like this one.

And when you book a call, you're talking to me - there's no sales team to get past.

This is the #1 concern business owners raise about AI, and it should be. Here's how I handle it: everything runs in your accounts, with your credentials - your data never lands on my systems. The AI services I set up are business-tier accounts that don't train on your data, and your agent gets restricted access: it sees what it needs for the task and nothing else, with human approval required on anything sensitive.

If you want maximum control, we can set up your own private AI on your own server - in house or in your own cloud - so your data never touches a third party at all.

Anything connected to other companies' systems eventually hits a change - a vendor updates their API, a form gets a new field. Pretending otherwise is how automation projects die quietly. So everything I build ships with three things: logging you can actually see, human-approval steps on anything sensitive (so a glitch can't send a wrong email or touch money), and plain-language documentation a future developer could pick up cold.

From there you choose: maintain it in house, hire anyone you like (you own the code and every account), or have me keep it healthy on a monthly retainer. No lock-in - that's the point.

You probably did - MIT made headlines saying 95% of corporate AI pilots fail. Read past the headline, though, and the study says the failures came from approach: vague scope, no connection to real workflows, no measurement. The same research found that buying from an outside specialist succeeded about three times as often as building internally.

That finding is basically my business model: one narrow workflow at a time, fixed fee, measured before and after, with a working result - not a strategy deck. And if the audit doesn't earn its fee, I refund it.

No, and I'd push back if that were the goal. What gets automated is the work nobody wants and nobody was hired for - the chasing, the copying between systems, the re-typing, the Friday spreadsheet. Your people keep the judgment calls, the relationships, and the approval clicks. In my own company, automation didn't shrink the team - it gave the team their hours back.

You're exactly who this is built for. Your agent comes with skills customized to your tasks - your team clicks the task they want done, gives the key details, and it goes and does it, every time. No prompt engineering, no settings to fiddle with. Training your team is part of every build, and I design around how you already work instead of asking you to change.

That's exactly why the $800 3-day audit exists - small teams usually have one or two workflows eating a painful share of the week, and finding them doesn't take two weeks. And if I look at your operation and don't think automation would pay for itself, I'll tell you that on the free call and we'll part friends. I run a small business too - I'm not interested in selling you something that doesn't return.