What I actually do
Two kinds of engagement, priced and scoped differently, because they're solving different problems. Most clients need the second one.
Lane two — the majority of my work
Operations & process consulting
You have a bottleneck, and you're not convinced software is the answer. You're probably right. I come in, look at how the work actually moves through your organization, and tell you what's really causing the delay.
Typical starting symptoms
- One person is manually moving data between systems, and everything queues behind them.
- Approvals stall because nobody agreed who decides what, at what threshold.
- The numbers people need to make a decision live somewhere they can't reach in time.
- A process was designed for a smaller organization and nobody has revisited it since.
- You're being sold a platform and you want an independent read before you sign.
What you get
- A current-state map of how the work really happens — workarounds included.
- Stakeholder interviews across every group the change would touch, not just the person who hired me.
- An independent test of vendor capability claims against your actual systems.
- A phased recommendation where phase one is low-risk, reversible, and worth doing on its own.
- A written rationale you can hand to a board or a finance committee.
Sometimes the deliverable is "don't do this." That's a legitimate outcome and you'll still get the full reasoning behind it. Knowing which project not to fund is worth more than most projects.
Lane one
When AI is already in the picture
Two versions of this, and they need opposite things.
A. Something you deployed isn't working
An automation stopped firing and nobody noticed for weeks. A tool went in and adoption never happened. Output that was fine in the demo is unreliable in production. Or the person who built it has left.
- Diagnosis of what actually broke — the model, the data, the integration, or the process around it. It is usually the last one.
- A straight answer on whether it's worth repairing, replacing, or switching off.
- If it's worth keeping: documentation and a maintenance path so it isn't one person's private knowledge again.
B. You want to try something small before committing
You've heard enough about AI to want a real answer for your own organization, but not enough to justify a platform contract. Good instinct. The right next step is one narrow pilot, not a strategy.
- One specific, bounded use case — chosen because it's measurable, not because it demos well.
- A fixed scope, a fixed end date, and a defined "this worked / this didn't" test agreed up front.
- Reversible by design. Nothing your team can't walk away from.
- An honest write-up at the end, including when the answer is that it isn't worth scaling.
How engagements are structured
Every engagement starts with a free 30-minute conversation, and I'll tell you in that call whether I think I'm the right person. After that, work is scoped in phases with a defined deliverable at the end of each one, so you're never committing to an open-ended project.
I work solo. You're not getting a pitch team and then a junior. The person in the discovery meeting is the person doing the work.
Start with a conversation
Thirty minutes, no charge, no obligation — and a straight answer about whether this is worth pursuing.