Most AI consulting for small business is enterprise consulting with a smaller invoice — the same maturity assessment, the same roadmap, sold to a company that needed neither. A small company does not have an AI strategy problem. It has a specific job that eats hours every week, done by hand, usually by the owner or the one person who cannot be sick.
Here is the part most vendors will not say: a lot of what a small business needs from AI already exists inside software it pays for. Your accounting tool, your CRM, your inbox and your document suite have all shipped AI features that overlap with much of what gets pitched as custom work. If configuration of what you already own solves it, we tell you that on the call — and the engagement ends there.
When something is genuinely worth building, the shape of the work changes at small scale. You state your budget ceiling before we scope, not after. We take one workflow at a time to done instead of proposing a platform. And the handoff assumes no engineer on staff: when we leave, you run it.
What we will not do is sell you a transformation. Automation at small scale is bought one job at a time, worst first — so each job after the first gives back fewer hours for roughly the same build cost. Somewhere in that sequence the next build stops paying for itself, and we will tell you when you are there. Past that point, the roadmap is a vendor's growth plan, not yours.
Scope
Before anything is proposed, we inventory the software you already subscribe to and the AI sitting unused inside it. Where a setting, a template or an integration you already own covers the job, that is the recommendation — in writing, with the steps. We do not resell tools and take no margin on anything we point you to.
You tell us what the problem is worth to you at the start, and the scope is written inside that bound. A proposal written before the budget conversation is a document designed to be negotiated; ours is designed to be signed or declined in one reading. If the ceiling only buys configuration, you hear that instead of a stretched scope.
The thing that kills automation at small scale is the platform: a system that promises to run everything and is abandoned half-configured the month the owner gets busy. We build one workflow — the quote follow-up, the invoice chase, the inbox triage, the report nobody enjoys compiling — into production before a second one is even discussed.
In a small business, a wrong message goes to a customer who knows the owner by name. Anything that sends money, contacts a customer or deletes a record passes a human approval step, and every action is logged so you can see exactly what the system did and why, without asking us.
Handoff assumes the person running this is you, not a hire you have yet to make. You get a plain-language runbook, the what-to-do-when-it-breaks steps, and accounts in your name from day one. Nothing about keeping it alive requires a retainer, a licence we control, or a phone call to us.
We quote a fixed fee against a written scope, not a published rate card, because the scope is what sets the price. What makes this workable at small-business budgets is the order of operations: you name your ceiling on the first call, and scope is written inside it. If the honest answer is that your ceiling buys configuration of tools you already own rather than custom work, that is the answer you get — before there is anything to sign.
The label matters less than what changes at small scale. Small business AI consulting done properly has no discovery phase billed by the week, no roadmap deck, and no assumption that an engineering team exists to receive the output. The owner is the buyer, the operator and usually the approver, so everything — the scope, the runbook, the rollback steps — is written for that one person. The general version of this service is on our AI consulting page; this page exists because the small-company version is a different job.
Yes — that is the default we design for, not an exception. AI consulting for businesses without an engineer on payroll fails at handoff, not at build: the system works until the first hiccup, then dies because fixing it needs the vendor. So the handoff here is the deliverable, not an appendix — accounts in your name, a runbook in plain language, and failure steps you can execute without knowing what an API is.
Often, yes — and checking that is the first thing we do, not the thing we hope you never ask. Where those tools genuinely fall short is connection: they each work inside their own box, and the job that eats your week usually runs across your inbox, your spreadsheet and your invoicing tool at once. If your problem lives inside one box, you likely do not need us, and we will say so.
No. The engagement ends at handoff, and the system is built so that ending it is safe: your accounts, your data, no licence of ours in the middle. If something changes later — the workflow shifts, a tool you rely on changes its behaviour — you can come back for a scoped piece of work. Coming back should be a choice, not a dependency we engineered.
The job, not a technology. Do not arrive with an AI idea — arrive with the task you or someone on your payroll does by hand every week and quietly resents. Walk us through one real instance of it, start to finish, including the ugly step everyone works around. That is enough for us to tell you whether it is a configuration job, a build, or something automation will not fix.
Founder · he answers these himself
Fixed fee, scoped in writing before anything starts. No hourly billing, no verbal scope.
Related: AI consulting — the general page · AI workflow automation · Building without hiring a developer · How we work