Practical AI for operators, no hype, just what works.
The checklists, workflows, and patterns we use with clients to reduce manual work and make operations easier to run. Take what's useful. Share it with your team.
Playbooks, templates, and tools to put AI to work.
Step-by-step playbooks plus the copy-ready templates, toolkits, and reading we hand clients during an engagement. Take what's useful and share it with your team.
Templates, tools & reading
The AI Agent Playbook
Eighteen AI agent use cases from six teams, drawn step by step: what plain automation handles, what an AI agent can take on, the calls that stay with your people, and what each step is worth.
Heard an AI Term in a Meeting? Here’s What It Means for You.
Six pages for the people who run the business: AI strategy, workflow first, buy vs build, MCP, AI and your data, and multiplayer AI. Each takes one term, says what it is, and shows what it changes for your team. Start from the question you have.
An AI Strategy Isn’t Wanting AI. It’s Naming What Changes.
How to build one in six plain steps: score what hurts, time it, pick the right fix (often not AI), write it on one page, prove it on real cases, and keep checking.
The AI Strategy Workbook
Six tabs, one for each step: score what hurts, time it, pick the fix, and the one-pager builds itself, ready to print. Then test the first fix and track it. Works in Excel, Google Sheets and Numbers.
The AI Isn’t the Project. The Workflow Is.
Why a rollout dies a month after the training, how forty steps come down to eighteen before anything is automated, and what the month after the build contains. A visual explainer, free and ungated.
AI Runs on Your Data. Which of the Six Copies?
How AI looks things up in your business, why the spreadsheet between your systems makes it wrong and unsafe, and how connecting your tools and giving each fact a rule fixes both. A visual explainer, free and ungated.
Wish Your AI Had More Context? Meet MCP.
What an MCP server actually is, what it gets you, and the point where a chat window with nine connections has quietly become a process nobody wrote down. A visual explainer, free and ungated.
The Software You’d Actually Want Has Never Been for Sale.
Every business has a list of what it would change about its software. Why no vendor could build it, why nobody built it themselves, what changed the price, and where AI works better once you choose where it plugs in. A visual explainer, free and ungated.
Work Is Multiplayer. Your AI Should Be, Too.
Why personal AI leaves every handoff ending in “ask so-and-so”, and what changes when people and AI read from one shared record. A visual explainer, free and ungated.
From Spreadsheets to a Modern Claims Platform
For settlement administration firms running on an aging system and a wall of spreadsheets. What maps, what automates, what stays human, and what the first two weeks look like. Includes a take-home workbook.
Where the Hours Go for In-House Real Estate Legal Teams
For general counsel at real estate owner-operators. Separate the reading from the deciding, measure it in your own numbers, and write your positions down. Includes a take-home workbook.
Find the Work Before the RFP Exists
For the person who finds public-sector work. Using AI for the four jobs of that seat: finding the deal early, reading the field, knowing the buyer before the call, and answering the solicitation. Includes four working prompts and a calculator.
60-Minute Workflow Audit Template
Map current processes and identify automation opportunities in an hour.
Software Selection Toolkit
A hosted toolkit for choosing software the right way — a vetting workbook in Google Sheets and Excel, plus quick guides, email templates, and a glossary.
Ops Book Recommendations
The operations and leadership books we recommend most — the reading behind how we think about building and running teams.
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Podcasts we've been on lately.
Podcasts and recorded conversations on AI, automation, and how operations actually work in mid-market companies.
You Can’t Automate a Broken Process
Our CEO with analyst Michael Fauscette on why getting ready for AI starts with the work, not the tools: getting data and process ready, governance, and what to tell the board.
Single-Player vs. Multiplayer AI
Our CEO with Chad Harvey on why most companies are getting AI wrong: AI that helps one person versus AI a whole team works from, and what it takes to get there.
How to Build AI-Ready Operations Software
Our CEO on the SaaS Therapy podcast — building AI-ready products and the operational systems behind them.
AI Adoption in Mid-Market Companies
Our CEO on why AI adoption often fails and how companies can build operational systems that deliver at scale.
The Case for Automations and AI
Hype versus reality with AI tools, the three pillars of modernizing a company (people, process, technology), and more.
Joanna Li: Startups are a Multiplayer Game
Joanna Li, COO and co-founder of Switchboard, on how automation and AI are reshaping small-business operations.
Stay ahead with us.
Short insights on automation, AI, and modern ops. No spam, just practical ideas you can use this week.
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A before-and-after look at how a team reduced manual work and gained operational visibility.
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