A half-day working session
Growing without hiring
Your team is absorbing more volume than it was two years ago with roughly the same people. Some of that was slack you'd already used up. We spend half a day finding out exactly where the next increment of growth costs you a hire, and which of those are worth building around.
This is about absorbing growth with the team you have. It isn't about needing fewer of them. Anyone hoping to replace their team rather than sharpen it should stop reading here.
What you leave with
A written capacity map, not a photo of a whiteboard.
Every bottleneck your team names, in their words. What it costs you now. What it costs at 30 percent more volume. And whether each one is a build, a buy, or a leave-it-alone.
It gets drafted on screen while the room watches, and you get the written version within two business days.
It's yours whether or not we ever work together again. That includes the parts that say buy this tool instead, with the tool named and the price on it, and the parts that say this isn't a technology problem at all.
The session
Half a day, four parts.
01
Where the work actually goes
Your numbers, out loud. What you did two years ago, what you do now, with what team. Then straight talk about what these tools genuinely do well and badly, using work your people recognize. No hype, no doom. This part exists so the rest of the day is honest.
02
Your work, live
Real tasks, your own documents, everyone doing it themselves. Not a demo. One of the exercises is chosen to partly fail, because the moment your team catches something the tool got wrong is the moment this stops being a sales pitch.
03
Where your judgment is the product
For each bottleneck, we mark where judgment actually enters the process. At the front, in the middle, at the end, or all the way through. That one distinction separates what's worth building from what only looks like it.
04
What this costs at 30 percent more volume
The list gets priced. What it costs now, what it costs next year, then build, buy, or skip, called out loud with the reasoning. The top three get a rough range and a rough timeline.
Who's in the room
Six to twelve people. It's a working session, not a keynote, and past twelve nobody actually does the work. Bigger company, send a delegation of the people closest to the work. That's usually a better session anyway.
Operations, HR, finance, sales and service groups doing knowledge work.
The people who do the work, not the people who manage them.
Your leader joins the first 45 minutes and the last hour, not the middle. The complaints that name real bottlenecks don't get made in front of the boss. The middle of the day is where those come out, and it's the reason the map is worth anything.
Who it isn't for
Engineering teams looking for model-level or MLOps training.
Companies wanting a keynote rather than a working session.
Anyone hoping to replace their team rather than sharpen it.
What it costs
$3,500 remote. $4,500 on site.
Plus tax where applicable.
Same number as the working prototype, and that's deliberate. Two ways in, one price. If you can already name the bottleneck, start with a prototype. If you can't, start here.
On site covers the Kansas City metro, travel included. Anywhere else, we'll talk about it before you commit to anything.
It isn't credited toward a build, and here's the reasoning. Prototype work carries straight into the build, so it's credited in full. A half day of facilitation doesn't carry into anything, so crediting it would just be a discount with a story attached. You're paying for the map. The map is the product.
If we get to the end and there's nothing on it worth acting on, say so before we hang up and you don't pay. I'd rather refund a session than argue about one.
Before the day
Half a day only works because of what happens first.
A 30-minute call with whoever's leading it, to get the growth numbers.
A 10-minute survey your team answers privately, so the honest version arrives before I do.
Three to five real documents you work with every week, under NDA. Digital only, scanned paper doesn't work for this.
That prep is most of the reason four hours is enough.
Start here
Twenty free minutes first.
Tell me what's grown and what hasn't. If half a day isn't the right shape for your problem, I'll say so on that call, and if an off-the-shelf tool already covers it I'll point you at it.