The engagement
Four stages. You can stop after any one of them and still own something useful.
A consult, then a written scope with a fixed price and the acceptance criteria spelled out. Nothing starts before you hold both.
We build the smallest honest version and test it against real work of yours. If it does not clear the criteria, you are told plainly, not sold a phase two.
Into your environment, on your terms, on hardware you own where the data is sensitive, with whoever runs your IT in the room.
Documentation, a runbook, and the knowledge to maintain it. You keep the result whether or not you keep us.
The terms
A written scope, acceptance criteria, source files and configuration, handover documentation, and thirty days of support after delivery. Out-of-scope work is $225 per hour and only with your written go-ahead.
Everything built for you under the engagement, and your own data throughout. We claim no license to your documents, your files, or your process knowledge.
Straight answers
The fastest way to tell a real practice from a rebranded one.
If nobody on your side will own the result after handover, we will say so and recommend against it. Orphaned projects are the most common way this money is wasted.
Every external service touched in an engagement is named and approved in writing first. Where that is not acceptable, the answer is on-premises, and we build it that way.
Plenty of problems are a form, a spreadsheet, or one database query. If that is the answer, that is the recommendation, and it is a smaller invoice.
We measure in hours returned and errors avoided, on work we have actually watched. Anyone quoting a payroll number before looking at your process is guessing.
Questions
No. Manufacturing is where the domain knowledge runs deepest, so those conversations move fast and need no translation. The method itself is industry-agnostic — the same six habits apply to a professional practice, a distributor, or an owner-run shop. Most of the work is document-heavy, quote-heavy, paperwork-heavy businesses of any kind.
Yes, and the site you are reading is one of them, along with the three others in this group, each with its own identity and infrastructure. Built by hand rather than assembled from a template, deployed properly, and handed over with the keys.
A deliberately small practice. The person you talk to on the consult is the person who builds the thing, which is why few engagements are held at once and why the schedule is quoted honestly rather than optimistically.
Only if you decide it does. For sensitive work we deploy local models and local retrieval, so documents never leave your building. Where an external service genuinely is the better tool, it is named in the scope and approved by you before anything is sent.
The acceptance criteria are written before the work starts, so there is no argument about it afterward. If the work cannot clear its criteria, you are told why in writing, and you are not invoiced for a second phase to find out.
Whichever fits the constraint. Local open-weight models where privacy rules, hosted frontier models where capability rules, and ordinary software where no model is needed at all. We are not a reseller for anyone, so the recommendation is not compensated.
No — that is the common case and the assessment exists for it. You get a ranked, costed list and a clear recommendation, including the recommendation to wait if that is the honest one.
Next step
The consult is free and there is no deck. You will get a straight answer on whether it is worth doing, what it would take, and what it would cost.
