For Small Business Owners
Find 5 Hours a Week Hiding in Your Business. Guaranteed.
The Operations Audit, for small businesses with 2–20 employees. Guided pre-work in a private client portal, focused interviews with the people who do the work, one workflow set up and running before the report lands, and a prescriptive report of off-the-shelf tools that fit how you actually operate, plus what to stop paying for. No jargon, no retainer required. Based in Atlanta, working with businesses anywhere.
You Don't Have an AI Problem. You Have a Time Problem.
You're running a real business. Payroll, customers, the truck that broke down Tuesday. Meanwhile every vendor, every podcast, and probably your brother-in-law keeps telling you AI is going to change everything.
They might be right. But evaluating forty tools you've never heard of is a part-time job, and you already have three of those. So AI stays on the someday list while the admin work keeps eating 10, 15, 20 hours of your week: the email, the scheduling, the invoices, the follow-ups.
The audit does the evaluation for you. Your team tells us how the business actually runs, through guided pre-work and short interviews. I come back with the short list of tools that actually fit it, the math on the hours they buy back, and the list of what you can stop paying for.
You'll Leave Knowing What to Cancel
Most small businesses I talk to are paying for software nobody opened last month: seats that were never used, a second tool that does what the first one already does, an AI subscription someone tried once. The pre-work asks what you pay for and who actually uses it, and the report puts a monthly number on what you can cancel.
Sometimes that number is zero, and the report says so. When it isn't, the audit has paid for part of itself before you install anything. I have no affiliate relationships and no stake in what you pick, so there is nothing in it for me if you buy more.
How It Works
Six steps. Pre-work happens on your schedule, interviews are short and focused, the analysis is entirely on our side of the desk, and the first install takes ninety minutes with the person who will use it.
Pre-Work in Your Client Portal
The moment you check out, a private portal link lands in your inbox. No account, no passwords, works on your phone, and it saves as you type. Six short sections, about an hour total, done on your schedule:
- Answer in as many sittings as you need; your progress keeps
- Forward the link to whoever on your team knows an answer best
- Upload the documents that show how the business actually runs
- Tell us who we should interview and how to schedule them
Stakeholder Interviews
Short, focused conversations with the people who feel the pain: about an hour with you, 30-45 minutes each with leads like scheduling, billing, and HR. Every interview is recorded and transcribed so nothing gets lost. We dig into:
- A walk through yesterday, hour by hour: where the day actually went
- The tasks people dread and the ones that keep getting pushed
- Where work piles up waiting on someone
- What you already tried that did not stick, from tools to automations
Analysis (Our Side of the Desk)
The part that costs you zero hours. I take everything from the portal and the interviews, analyze your workflows against the current tool landscape, identify the handful of highest-value opportunities, and pressure-test every pick against tools I use daily in my own business and client work.
One Thing Working
Before the report lands, I pick the lowest-effort, highest-certainty item from the priority matrix and set it up live with the person who will use it every day. Ninety minutes with that person, my hands on the keyboard, and a one-page runbook at the end. You have one workflow running before you have read a word of the report.
Prescriptive Report
Within a week of the last interview you get a report built to be acted on, not filed. It opens with an executive summary naming your top 3 moves and what you can cancel, and ranks every recommendation by impact against effort. No "explore your options" filler. Full contents below.
45-Minute Review Call
We screen-share the report and walk each recommendation together. You leave with three things decided:
- Which recommendation is most urgent for your business
- What you will do yourself and where you might want help
- Your rollout timeline, starting from the one already running
- Then questions by email for 30 days after the call
What's in the Report
- An executive summary naming your top 3 moves, in order
- What to cancel: the tools you already pay for and do not use, with the monthly total, plus the categories that do not fit a business your size and why
- A priority matrix ranking every recommendation by impact against effort
- 3–7 specific tool prescriptions matched to your actual workflows, each with what it replaces, monthly cost, and setup time
- Hours-reclaimed estimate per tool, against the baseline from your pre-work and interviews, labeled by how defensible it is
- A data-readiness check per prescription: go, conditional, or not yet, so nothing gets installed on records that aren't ready for it
- A week-by-week rollout order, so you're never adopting more than one thing at a time
- A quick-start plan for the first four days, starting from the one thing already running
- The financial math: hours returned × the loaded cost of whoever was doing the work − tool costs
The Guarantee
If the audit can't find you 5 defensible hours a week, the $999 comes back.
Defensible means measured against the baseline we set in your pre-work and interviews, attached to a named task, with a named tool or workflow that removes it. Anything the report cannot defend ships as a pilot, labeled as one, and does not count toward the five. And one of those hours-savers is already running before you read the report, so the finding is not theoretical.
Who This Is For
A good fit
- 2–20 employees, roughly $500K–$5M in revenue
- Service-heavy operations, where the money comes from people doing work
- The owner still does admin: email, scheduling, invoices, follow-ups
- You know AI could help but haven't had time to figure out how
Not a fit
- Enterprises with an IT department (you need a different engagement)
- Anyone who wants software built before knowing what the business needs. The audit prescribes off-the-shelf tools; when off-the-shelf can't do it, I build it, scoped separately
- Businesses looking for someone to run the tools for them. That's the AI Concierge, offered after your audit
Pricing
The Operations Audit
$999flat
Everything in one price: pre-work portal, stakeholder interviews, analysis, one workflow set up and running, the report, the review call, and 30 days of email questions. Checkout takes about two minutes, and you book your kickoff interview as soon as payment goes through.
Backed by the guarantee: if the audit can't find you 5 defensible hours a week, the full $999 comes back.
The $999 Is Just the Door
Most clients take the report and run with it. For the ones who want more, this is what comes after. It never gets pitched during the audit.
For When You Want It Done for You
Report to Running
Sixty days, fixed price, fixed end date. It starts with your Business Context Pack: how your business runs, written down. Hours, pricing rules, customer policies, voice, escalation rules, and a plain-language SOP for each installed workflow, in files you own. Then the top 3 prescriptions from your report get set up on top of it, working, with your team actually using them. Four 60-minute working sessions, a runbook per tool, and an hours-returned number measured against the baseline from your audit.
$3,750, and your $999 audit credits against it, so $2,751. This is where the hours actually come back, and where I stand behind them: we measure at day 60 against your audit baseline, and if the three installed workflows are short of the hours the audit attached to them, you get two more working sessions at no charge. Still short at day 90, and the $2,751 comes back. Custom automations and builds are scoped separately. It ends with a close-out call, which is the only place the Concierge ever gets pitched.
For When You Want a Seat on the Team
AI Concierge
$1,800/month. Two working sessions a month, one automation or Claude skill built and handed over each month where scope allows, async answers within one business day, a monthly review of your Context Pack against how the business actually changed (hours, pricing, and policies drift every week), a health check on every installed workflow (what broke, what drifted, what nobody uses), and the spine of the whole thing: a one-page scorecard on the first business day of every month showing cumulative hours returned against your audit baseline. You own everything we build, and it stays yours if you ever leave.
For audit clients only. Not to be difficult: a retainer with someone who has not baselined your business burns its first two months learning what your report already told me. Six active clients, two new per quarter, so every engagement gets real attention.
Prefer a one-off project? Automation builds (one cut-and-dry workflow in Zapier, Make, n8n, or a Claude skill) and internal tools (software your business runs on, built to a published production standard) are scoped case by case after your audit, and the $999 credits toward Report to Running or any build of $3,000 or more.
Who's Behind This
I'm Ed Gaile: 25+ years building and running technology, and a small business owner myself. I've done the payroll, chased the invoices, and answered email at 10pm, which is exactly why this audit prescribes tools you can adopt in an afternoon instead of a strategy deck.
I'm based in Atlanta and happy to work in person with local businesses, or remotely with anyone. I use these tools daily, build with AI professionally, and have no affiliation with anything I recommend.
Questions, Answered
What kind of tools do you recommend?
Off-the-shelf software you can sign up for the same day: AI note-takers, email triage, scheduling, document automation, industry-specific tools. I have no affiliate relationships and no stake in what you pick. If the honest answer to a problem is a $15/month tool, that's what goes in the report. And if the honest answer is to cancel something, that goes in too.
Do I need technical staff to use what you recommend?
No. Every tool in the report is chosen partly for how quickly your team can adopt it. Setup time is listed per tool, and most are under an hour. If a recommendation would need a developer, it doesn't go in the report. It goes in a separate section labeled as a bigger project, clearly marked optional.
We already use ChatGPT. Is this still useful?
Almost certainly. Using ChatGPT puts you ahead of most small businesses, but it's one tool applied generically. The audit finds the specific tools that attach to your actual bottlenecks, the places generic chat doesn't reach: the invoicing, the scheduling, the follow-up emails.
How is the 5-hour guarantee measured?
During the pre-work and interviews we baseline how many hours a week the target tasks currently take, and you confirm those numbers before we start. The report attaches hours to each prescription against that baseline, and only the hours it can defend count: a named task, a named tool or workflow, a measured starting point. If those defensible hours don't add up to at least 5 a week, I refund the full $999. Hours actually returned are measured at the day-30 check-in, and Report to Running is where I stand behind them.
When do I pay?
Up front. Checkout takes about two minutes, and you book your kickoff interview as soon as payment goes through. Your private pre-work portal link follows by email, and we schedule the remaining interviews with the people you name there. The guarantee carries the risk from there: if the audit can't find you 5 defensible hours a week, the full $999 comes back.
Is my business information confidential?
Yes. Your pre-work, the interviews, and everything derived from them stay between us. The pre-work asks whether I may use your results as a case study, named, anonymized, or not at all. I use whichever answer you gave, you approve every word before anything is published, and I ask again only if you told me to.
In person or remote?
Either. I'm in Atlanta, and for local businesses I'm happy to do the interviews at your office. Remote works fine everywhere else; interviews and the review call run on Zoom or Google Meet.
What happens after the audit?
Most clients implement the report themselves. It's designed for that, and one item is already running when you get it. If you'd rather have it done for you, Report to Running is a 60-day engagement at $3,750 that writes down how your business runs and installs your report's top 3 prescriptions on top of it, with your $999 credited against it. And if you want ongoing help, the AI Concierge is $1,800/month for audit clients: two working sessions a month, one build handed over each month, upkeep of what's installed, and a monthly scorecard of hours returned against your baseline. Neither comes up until you've digested your report. One-off automation builds and internal tools are scoped case by case, and the $999 credits toward any build of $3,000 or more.
Five Hours Found, or Your Money Back.
The audit asks for about an hour of pre-work, a handful of short interviews, ninety minutes to get one thing running, and $999. The guarantee stands behind all of it: if I can't find you 5 defensible hours a week, the full amount comes back. And one thing is already working before you read the report.