Two ways to start. Pick the one that matches where you are.

No, and that is deliberate. The first call is 45 minutes of us asking questions and listening — no pitching and no jargon, just finding where the friction actually is. Then we go away and research it properly: which specific tools fit your specific problems, what they cost, what order to tackle them in. We hand the plan over on a second call and walk you through it. Anyone who hands you a tool list inside the first conversation is reading from a script rather than looking at your business.

Two, on either option. The free route is a 15-minute discovery call followed by a short follow-up where we tell you what we think. The paid route is a 45-minute audit call followed by a walkthrough call where you receive the report and the 4-day quick-start plan.

Both routes end with a written proposal of what we would build for you and what it costs — the free call is a real deliverable, not a sales screen. What the $999 assessment adds is everything you can act on without hiring anyone: 3 to 7 off-the-shelf AI tools hand-picked for your business, your opportunities ranked by impact against effort, an estimate of the hours and dollars you get back each month, and a 4-day plan for starting. If you want work done for you, the free call is enough. If you also want to start improving things yourself next week, that is the assessment.

It is a real deliverable that stands on its own, and the structure is built so you can tell. The 3 to 7 tools are off the shelf and yours to run without us — that is the point of prescribing tools rather than builds. The guarantee is measured on what we find, not on whether you hire us. And the proposal exists because some problems genuinely have no off-the-shelf answer, so it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise and leave you stuck. Plenty of clients take the quick wins, do them themselves, and we never hear from them again. That is a completely fine outcome and it is priced accordingly.

Entirely up to you. Most people start with the 4-day quick-start plan, because it is designed to be done without help. If the proposal names something worth building — and it usually does, because the bigger opportunities are exactly the ones a tool cannot fix — you have the scope and the price in writing and can decide in your own time. There is no expiry on it and no follow-up sequence.

Possibly, and we would rather tell you than take the money. The assessment is built to find at least 5 hours a week worth reclaiming, and in a one-person business that is genuinely harder — there is simply less repetitive volume to work with. If you are a solo operator or still getting going, start with the free call. You still get a written proposal with prices out of it, and if it turns out there is more there than we expected, the assessment is not going anywhere.

If we cannot find at least 5 hours a week across your business that you could reclaim, you get 100% of your money back. Worst case, you lose 45 minutes. Best case, you get your week back. We carry that risk rather than asking you to, because we would rather turn down a fee than talk someone into an assessment that will not find anything.

What we find. It is measured against the report we hand you at the walkthrough — if that report cannot point to 5 hours a week worth reclaiming, you get your money back. What happens afterwards is in your hands: if the plan names the hours and you decide not to act on any of it, we have done what you paid for. We are happy to be judged on the quality of the findings, but we cannot be judged on whether the tools get switched on unless you hire us to switch them on.

Not on your side. The 3 to 7 tools in the assessment are all off the shelf — things you can sign up for and start using immediately with no setup team. Anything that does need building properly, like a website, a chatbot or a voice agent, we build and hand over; you never need to hire a developer to work with us. The proposal tells you which category each recommendation falls into, so you always know whether it is a job for you or a job for us.

Because time drains in a small business are rarely one problem. They are usually four or five separate frictions, each with a different fix. Recommending a single platform to solve all of them is how businesses end up paying enterprise prices for software they use ten percent of. A short, specific list is easier to act on and cheaper to run.

We ask what your business does, where the manual work piles up, and what you have already tried. Then we go away and come back on a short follow-up with a written proposal: which of our services would actually fix what you described, and what each one costs. Sometimes the honest answer is that a better spreadsheet template or a cheaper subscription solves your problem, and we will say so rather than sell you something.

No. Most of our clients could not tell you the difference between a chatbot and an agent, and they do not need to. Bring an understanding of your own business and where it hurts. The technical translation is our job.

Very little preparation is needed — the call is structured and we drive it. What helps most is having someone on the call who actually does the day-to-day work, not only the owner. They know where the friction really is, and they are the ones who will notice it disappear.

We email it to you a little before the walkthrough call, so you get time with it on your own rather than reading it live while someone talks. Then we get on a call and go through it properly — the reasoning behind each recommendation, and the questions that only surface once you are looking at the real thing. A report that only arrives by email is easy to skim and easy to shelve; the 4-day quick-start plan is far more likely to actually get started if someone has walked you through day one.

Every call is over video — Google Meet, and the link comes with your booking confirmation, so there is nothing to install or set up. That applies to businesses down the road from us as well. That is a deliberate choice rather than a limitation: on a video call you can share your screen and show us the actual system that is wasting your time, which beats describing it across a table. It also means no travel at either end, and easier rescheduling when your week goes sideways. We work with businesses anywhere in the United States on exactly the same basis.

Book the free call anyway. Part of what we do on it is tell people when the timing is wrong — when the underlying process is too broken to automate, or when the volume is too low to justify the effort. Knowing that early saves you far more than it costs.