Send me one workflow
Describe one task your team does every week that you wish it did not have to. Inside 48 hours I send back a written teardown: how I would automate it, which parts should be code rather than AI, where it would break, and whether it is worth doing at all. Free, and no call required.
Some examples
Wealth and family offices
- The family's quarterly report, built from Excel and statements
- Billing across custodians and entities, by hand
- Capital calls and distribution notices, read from PDFs by hand
Real estate
- The investor report that lands weeks after the books close
- Vendor and utility bills keyed and coded to each property by hand
- Owner statements renamed and reordered by hand every month
Construction
- Interim financials for the surety, rebuilt by hand
- A WIP schedule that has to tie before the CPA sees it
- Under billings found after the job has faded
Built for 13 companies: wealth firms, family offices, developers, builders, distributors.
What you actually get
A page, in writing, about your task and not about AI in general.
The steps as they happen today, written back to you in a way you can check. Which parts should be handled by code, because they produce numbers and numbers cannot be approximately right. Which parts are better done by a model. Where the thing would break, which is usually a file somebody renames or an exception nobody documented. And an honest read on whether the automation is worth building, because often it is not.
You can forward it to whoever actually decides. That is deliberate. In most of the firms I work with, the person who feels the pain and the person who approves the spend are two different people, and a document travels between them better than a meeting does.
What one looks like
- The task:
- every quarter, one report per fund or entity for the family, assembled by hand from Excel and from each custodian's statement. Every statement is different, and the same person builds it every quarter.
- Code:
- reading each statement into one table and matching it to the book. These are balances and positions. They have to be exact every time, so this is a script, not a model.
- Model:
- the two paragraphs that explain what changed since last quarter, drafted for the person who signs the report, never sent without them.
- Where it breaks:
- a custodian changes its layout, or a statement arrives as a photo the script cannot read. It stops and names the page. It does not guess.
- Worth doing:
- yes, and not for speed. The same report built the same way every quarter, every number traceable to the statement it came from, and a log of who checked it.
- What I would not automate:
- what goes to the family. Someone reads it first, and the record of who read it stays with the firm.
Most of these come from family offices and wealth firms. The rest from the companies those families own: builders, developers, distributors.
Why I do this for free
Two reasons, and you should know both.
The first is that it is how I find out whether we would work well together. I do not pitch, and I am not good at selling something I have not looked at. Reading one real workflow tells me more than a discovery call does.
The second is that roughly half the time the honest answer is that you do not need me. You need one script somebody on your team can write, or you need to stop doing the task altogether. Saying so costs me nothing and it is the fastest way to be useful.
What I will not do with it
I will not put you into a sequence. There is no drip, no newsletter you are signed up for by accident, and nothing happens to your email address other than me replying to it.
I will not ask for your files. A description in your own words is enough for a teardown, and it keeps you out of the data-sensitivity conversation entirely until there is a reason to have it.
What to write
One paragraph is plenty. The more specific you are about how it actually happens, including the ugly parts, the more useful the answer.
The ones I can do most with sound like this. Every quarter one report per fund goes to the family, built by hand from Excel and statements. Each custodian sends a different statement, and some arrive as photos. Someone exports from Addepar into Excel every week to check cash account by account. Capital call and distribution notices arrive by email and someone keys them in by hand. Billing runs across several custodians and entities every quarter, by hand. Finding the memo from two years ago takes longer than writing a new one. Someone opens four spreadsheets every Monday and copies numbers between them. A report takes three weeks from close to delivery and nobody can say why. Every invoice gets coded by hand by the one person who knows which account it belongs to. A quote takes eight hours because the prices live in six PDFs.
If your version is messier than that, write the messy version.
What happens next
I read it, I write the teardown, and I send it inside 48 hours. If it is useful and you want to talk, there is a link at the bottom of it. If it is useful and you do not want to talk, that is a completely acceptable outcome and you will not hear from me again unless you write back.