Plaid Squirrel§1 Why
You have been pitched AI all year by people who have never watched how a quote gets out the door in your shop.
Most of what is being sold to small businesses right now will not pay for itself. Some of it will, considerably. Telling those apart is not a technology question, it is a question about how your particular week actually goes: who touches a job between the phone call and the invoice, and where that work stalls.
I have run production systems for twenty-five years, and I have owned a small business: payroll, P&L, my own money at risk. That second part is why I start with your hours rather than with a product.
§2 The work
- 01
Assess
About a week. I look at how work moves through your business: quoting, scheduling, invoicing, the follow-ups that eat your evenings. The fix is not always software. Sometimes it is a process change, or a tool you already pay for. You get a written plan with the arithmetic behind every recommendation, including the ones I tell you to skip. Roughly two hours of your time.
- 02
Build
If something is worth doing, I set it up. You are not handed a report and left to execute it yourself between quotes on a Saturday.
- 03
Run
I keep it working. Most owners have no interest in becoming the person who maintains this, and that is the part I take off your desk. This is the part that matters. The rest exists to earn it.
General IT comes with the territory for the businesses I already work with, since most are too small to keep two providers. It is not what I sell.
§3 The report
Short, written, and specific enough to act on without me.
Every recommendation carries its own arithmetic. Anything that does not earn its keep is written down as such, by name.
- An effort and impact matrix for your actual workflows
- Three quick wins you can start on immediately
- A four-day quick-start plan
- The cost and the hours-back math for each recommendation
- What to leave alone, and why
§4 Independence
The only person who pays me is you.
No reseller agreements, no commissions, no vendor referral fees. Nobody sends me a cheque for putting their product in front of you. That is what lets the honest answer be “this one will not help you.” When I write that down, I lose the work that would have followed it. That cost is the whole point of paying an outsider to look.
§5 What it costs
One number is fixed. The other two depend on what there is to build and to run.
- 01
Assess
$1,500
Fixed. A week of mine, about two hours of yours. If the report finds nothing worth building, it says so, and we stop there.
- 02
Build
Scoped per job
Depends on what the assessment found, so there is no standing figure to print here. You get the number in writing before anything starts.
- 03
Run
From $2,000 a month
Priced by how much I am keeping alive for you, and set when we both know what that is.
§6 Who
James Olson. Sonora, California.
Twenty-five years keeping production systems running for businesses that could not afford them to stop, and a small business of my own before that. I work with owner-operators around Sonora, the Gold Country and the Central Valley. Two to twenty people, mostly trades, professional services and small manufacturers.
You will not be handed to anyone else. There is no one else.
§7 Start
Forty-five minutes, no charge.
You will know by the end of the call whether this is worth your money. If it is not, I will say so on the call rather than send you a proposal.
