You built a business. Now it's breaking you.
I help small teams scale without chaos by writing down the processes your business runs on, then adding AI where it fits.
Sound familiar?
Monday, 7:40am
From the outside, everything looks fine. You've got clients and solid revenue.
Your phone has 14 messages before you've had coffee. Two are from clients. The rest are from your own team.
- A project manager wants to know if she can give a client 10% off.
- The new hire can't find the login for the scheduling tool. The person who set it up left in March.
- Someone asks where the latest proposal template is. There are 3 versions in 3 folders.
- A client email has sat unanswered since Thursday, because everyone thought someone else had it.
By 10am you've made 11 decisions. Your team could have made every one of them if the answers lived somewhere other than your head.
The afternoon you blocked for growth work gets pushed to Friday. It got pushed last week too.
You're running the company and doing the job of the operations manager you never hired.
Add up what the chaos costs
Pick one process. Proposals are a good place to start.
Proposals take 3 people 6 hours a week each. They find the last one, copy it, fix the pricing, then wait on you to approve it. At $40 an hour, that comes to about $37,000 a year. For one process.
3 people x 6 hours x 52 weeks x $40 an hour
$37,440 a year
Then there are the costs that never show up on a timesheet:
- The client who waited 4 days for a quote and signed with the firm that sent one in 4 hours.
- The good hire who quit in month 3 because nobody had time to train her.
- The job you quoted from memory, $2,000 under what it cost you to deliver.
- The vacation you cut short because something broke and only you knew the fix.
Most businesses your size have 4 or 5 processes like this. Nobody has ever put a number on them, so they feel like the normal cost of being busy.
Why most fixes don't work
You've tried the usual playbook:
- More tools, including AI
- "Just delegate it"
Each of those fixes one problem at a time. Your problems share one cause, so the chaos keeps coming.
Delegation without documentation hands the mess to someone else.
AI given access to that mess makes more of it.
Every business runs on a spine:
the few processes everything else depends on.
Meet Dana
Dana is a composite. Her details are typical of the founders this page is for.
Dana runs a 12-person marketing agency. Revenue last year was $2.4M, up from $900K 3 years ago.
In June she took her first full week off in 4 years. Her daughter was graduating.
She answered 31 messages that week. On Wednesday a proposal went out with last year's rates, because the new pricing lived in a spreadsheet on her laptop. The client signed, and the job lost $6,000.
On Friday her best account manager asked, politely, whether there was a plan for any of this. Two months later he left for a job with an onboarding manual.
Here's what an 80/20 audit would find in Dana's business:
- Proposals take 3 people 5 hours a week each, rebuilt from old files. That's about $31,000 a year.
- Pricing lives in one spreadsheet only Dana can open. One wrong quote cost $6,000.
- Handoffs from sales to delivery happen in Slack threads, and something falls through about twice a month.
- Training a new hire takes about 6 weeks of Dana's time, spread across 100 interruptions.
3 of the 4 (proposals, pricing, handoffs) could be written down in a week, and 2 automated after that. None of it needs Dana to work harder.
What I see most often
| Pattern | What breaks | What it costs you |
|---|---|---|
| Owner as glue | Every decision flows through one person | Team feels stuck, you feel fried |
| Frankenstein stack | 10 tools doing 3 jobs badly | The same work done twice |
| Ghost SOPs | Docs no one uses or trusts | Answers live in people's heads |
| Delegation traps | Work comes back half done | Owner still redoes the work |
Who you'd be working with
I started in sales, then spent years running operations for startups, SaaS companies and agencies. The biggest team I ran had 40 people. I wrote the SOPs, built the onboarding and sat in the middle of every handoff.
Now I do that work for founders who don't have an operations leader yet. I'm based between Spain and the US. I work with US businesses on US hours.
Find out what your busiest process is costing you.
Claim one of the 5 free auditsWhat changed how I work
After auditing business after business, I kept seeing the patterns in the table above.
So my audits end with the fixes written down, in order, with a dollar figure on each.
Sometimes we started with onboarding, sometimes with how a task moved from idea to done.
But the outcome was the same:
- Fewer bottlenecks
- Smarter decisions
- Teams that move without micromanagement
- AI the team uses
My core belief
AI accelerates whatever it touches, chaos included.
If your business runs on memory and hope, AI gets you to burnout faster.
Build the business on systems your team can follow, and AI has something solid to work from.
You get your afternoons back.
What other owners found
None of these are my clients. They are owners who said this in public, quoted as published.
"If you just set it up and set it and forget it, it will create chaos."
Amy Wood, founder and CEO of Flint Avenue Marketing, in Business Insider
Wood is not an AI skeptic. She runs several AI assistants in her agency and says she is staying all in.
"This imperative to get everything in a consolidated place has partly led me, ironically, to hire an additional person. You would think you'd be subtracting someone."
Liz Picarazzi, CEO of Citibin, on the 21 Hats Podcast
"So, any documentation I had done prior to yesterday is no longer applicable. It's worthless."
Paul Downs, Paul Downs Cabinetmakers, on the 21 Hats Podcast
3 owners in different industries ran into the same pattern. The tool worked. The business underneath it was not ready to hold what the tool produced.
Picarazzi ended up hiring a person to manage the thing that was supposed to save her a person. Downs found his documentation out of date overnight. Wood, who is all in on AI and says so, still warns you about the version of it you install and walk away from.
That is the order of operations. Spine first, then AI.
How I can help you
I work with small business owners (5 to 20 people, $1M to $5M in revenue) who are stuck in the chaos of success.
We codify what works and fix what's fragile.
AI goes in only when the business is ready for it.
You leave with your processes written down and your team able to run them.
What happens after you click
Fill in the form below
It's right below this section and takes about 2 minutes.
I email you to book a time
One session, 2 to 3 hours. We pick a time that works around your schedule.
Walk me through your work
You talk, I take notes. I map your top 3 processes.
You get the report
Same or next day. Your top 5 automation opportunities, priced in dollars, plus the process sketches.
Get the Process Audit Free
Normally $750. Free for the next 5 founders.
4 of 5 spots left
- 2 to 3 hours with you, one sitting.
- Your top 3 processes mapped.
- Your top 5 automation opportunities, each priced in dollars.
- A one-page report and the process sketches, yours to keep. Delivered the same day or the next.
Got it.
Your details are in. I will be in touch to set up your audit.
FAQ
Questions Founders Ask
Have a question that isn't here? Add it to the challenges box in the form and I'll answer before we book anything.
Why is it free?
To earn your trust. You walk away with your top 5 automation opportunities priced and your top 3 processes mapped. From there you can do the work yourself or hire someone, me included, to do it.
I don't have time for this.
It's one sitting of 2 to 3 hours. You talk, I take notes. You don't prepare anything and you don't get homework.
We tried ChatGPT and it didn't stick.
That usually happens when a tool lands on a process nobody has written down. The audit starts with the process, so any AI that comes later has something to follow.
What's the return?
Each of the 5 opportunities comes with the math: hours, people, cost per year. You'll see the number before you spend anything.
Is this a sales pitch in disguise?
You keep the report and the sketches whether or not we ever work together. If there's a next step that makes sense, I'll tell you what it costs.
Will my team push back?
The session is with you only. Nothing changes for your team until you decide it should.