100 door hangers, $70 all-in — one $3,000 job, two more out to bid
I designed a run of door hangers to introduce a different kind of mason, and we put 100 of them on a targeted route — about $70, shipping included. One landed a historic-register mansion and $3,000 in restoration work: his first heritage credential. Two more are out to bid right now. The lowest-tech tool on the menu, outperforming everything else on cost-to-return.
The Lead Scout
A weekly automated scan across more than a dozen sources — government bid portals, the plan room, homeowner platforms, community boards — consolidated into one email and a living tracker, surfacing $5K–$500K institutional restoration bids a residential operator never sees. With his first heritage credential now in hand, those bids have gone from out-of-reach to within reach.
From tasting-room chaos to a calmer Saturday
A family-run Finger Lakes winery was losing its shoulder seasons to the back office. Two siblings split winemaking, events, and the tasting room between them, and every event inquiry meant copy-pasting the same answers about capacity, pricing, and the dog-friendly patio into yet another email. Saturday mornings disappeared into spreadsheets reconciling club shipments. Every booking request that sat unanswered for three days was a booking that often went to the winery down the road.
We started with a single first look at the week. The highest-leverage task wasn't glamorous — it was the first-touch reply to event and tasting inquiries — so that's what we built first.
The tool reads incoming inquiries from the website form and email, drafts a warm, on-brand reply with the right pricing tier and availability, and flags anything that needs a human: large weddings, press, distributor questions. The owners approve or tweak with one tap from their phones. Nothing sends without them; it just removes the blank-page problem.
From there we layered in a club-shipment assistant that turns the monthly member list into ready-to-review shipping notes, plus a short, personal email for at-risk members whose cards had expired or who'd skipped a release.
The numbers moved fast. First-touch reply time dropped from roughly three days to same-day, and event admin fell from about six hours a week to forty-five minutes of approvals. The quieter win was retention: with timely, personal nudges, wine club retention climbed twenty-two percent over the first season — the difference between a good year and a flat one for a small producer.
We didn't try to automate the winery. We automated the one bottleneck quietly costing them bookings, then expanded only where it earned its place — and left the craft to the people who do it best.
Tax season without the 70-hour weeks
A four-person CPA firm came to us in November, bracing for another tax season that would swallow their winter. The partners knew exactly where the time went — they just couldn't stop it. New-client intake meant chasing documents over email, re-keying the same data into three systems, and answering the same dozen questions about what to send and when. Every January, the firm hired temporary help just to keep the inbox from burying them.
We ran a Two-Week Build: one painful process, fixed, in two weeks. The process we picked was client intake, because it touched everything downstream — if intake was clean and fast, the rest of the season was calmer.
The tool gives each new client a simple, guided checklist and collects documents through a single secure link. As files arrive, it sorts and labels them, extracts the key figures, and assembles a tidy intake summary the preparer can review in minutes instead of hours. When something's missing, it sends a polite, specific reminder on its own — no partner has to remember who still owes a W-2.
Because it's professional services, every output stays under human control. The firm reviews and signs off; the assistant just removes the clerical grind and the back-and-forth.
The first full season told the story. Onboarding a new client dropped from about three days of intermittent chasing to roughly four hours of focused review. Across the team, the partners reclaimed around nine hours a week during the busy stretch — time that went back into advisory work, the highest-margin thing they do. And for the first time in years, they cleared the season with zero missed deadlines and no temporary intake help.
The partners put it plainly: they didn't want to become a tech firm, they wanted their evenings back in April. The win wasn't a smarter spreadsheet — it was walking into the busiest ten weeks of the year with the part that used to break already handled.