The hire you can't fill.

The repetitive part

Four things that seat does that a person should not have to.

If you recognize two or more of these, there is probably a build here worth doing. If you recognize none of them, the role you are hiring for is a real role and you should keep hiring for it. I will say so on the call.

• Retyping what someone already typed

  Invoices, purchase orders, delivery tickets, applications, and intake forms arrive as PDFs, scans, photos, and email attachments, and somebody keys them into your system by hand. This is the single most common version of the job, and it is the one automation handles best.

• Moving data between systems that do not talk

  Numbers copied out of one application and into another, a spreadsheet maintained by hand because the report you need does not exist, a nightly export somebody reformats every morning.

• Sorting and routing what comes in

  Reading each message or document to decide what it is, who handles it, and how urgent it is. Easy for a person and mind-numbing at volume, which is exactly why it gets behind.

• Chasing what is missing

  Checking a document against what should be there, flagging the gaps, and following up. The checking is mechanical. The following up is a person's job.

How it goes

Three steps, and you can stop after the first.

1. 1

   A conversation, free

   Tell me what that seat does all day. I will tell you which parts are automatable and which are not, and if a product already on the market does it for a monthly fee, I will point you at it instead.

2. 2

   Scope, price, and the test, in writing

   One job, one number, and an agreed definition of working: which of your real documents the result gets scored against, and what score makes it worth keeping. Nothing starts before you have all three.

3. 3

   Built, scored, handed over

   Running on your own files and inside the systems your team already uses, with the score in writing and a session so your people can operate it without me.

One scoped build is $5,000 fixed, and smaller jobs run at $250 per hour with no minimum. If you would rather buy a considered answer before a build, a $250 working session gets you an hour on your actual problem and a written one-page plan you can act on, covering what I would do, credited in full against any engagement booked within thirty days. Full rates are on the engagements section of the main page.

Questions

What owners ask first.

• Is this really cheaper than hiring someone?

  A $38,000 clerical hire costs roughly $49,000 a year once payroll taxes, benefits, equipment, and software seats are counted, and that repeats every year. One scoped build is $5,000 once, about ten percent of a single year of that seat. The comparison only holds for the repetitive portion of the role, which is why the scoping conversation exists: to find out honestly how much of your version of the job that is.

• Am I replacing a person?

  Not in the way that phrase usually means. What gets taken over is the part nobody wants, which is the retyping, the sorting, the checking. The judgment stays with your team. Most owners who start here are not trying to cut headcount, they are trying to stop losing ground while a seat sits empty, and they want the person they eventually hire doing work worth a salary rather than keying invoices.

• We are not a tech company. Can we actually use this?

  Yes, if you have files and a specific job to do. You do not need a data team, a warehouse, a cloud contract, or a clean database. A folder of PDFs, an inbox, a QuickBooks file, or a spreadsheet somebody maintains by hand is a normal starting point. What matters is that the task is concrete and repetitive, not that your company is technical.

• What if it gets something wrong?

  It will, sometimes, which is why the accuracy gets measured before you rely on it rather than discovered afterward. We score the result against your own past documents, ones it never saw while being built, and you get that number in writing before handover. Anything below the bar gets flagged for a human instead of passed through silently. A person stays in the loop on anything consequential.

• How long until it is running?

  Weeks, not quarters. A scoped build is typically a few weeks from the first call to something working on your own files. I build with AI coding assistants, which is a large part of why that timeline is realistic rather than optimistic.

• What if an off-the-shelf tool already does this?

  Then I will tell you that and point you at it. A meaningful share of these requests are better served by a product that already exists for a monthly fee. Custom earns its keep when the work is specific to how you operate, when your data lives in systems no vendor integrates with, or when the volume makes per-seat pricing absurd. Finding that out in a scoping call costs you nothing.

• Who am I actually working with?

  Me, directly. Ph.D. physicist, twelve years building production AI and machine learning, eight of them at Oracle, the last three in its AI Center of Excellence for clients in manufacturing, oil and gas, public sector, and retail. One of those engagements automated the drafting of investigative reports from unstructured intake for a county HR department, which is the same shape of problem as the one on this page. There is no bench of junior consultants and nobody your project gets handed down to.

• Do I need to be in Austin?

  No. Delivery is remote and this work rarely needs anyone in the room. I am based in Cedar Park in the Austin metro and spend part of the year in the Knoxville area, so on-site time is easy in either region and available elsewhere when a project genuinely calls for it.

Hiring for a role that is genuinely a role? Then hire. This page is for the seat where most of the day is mechanical. If you are not sure which one you have, that is a good thing to spend a free call finding out.