Inside an engagement.

Studios · Brand & web

How a Studios engagement runs.

Every Studios project moves through six phases. Two of them are real decision points where you pick a direction or sign off. The rest happens in the background and arrives at your door for review.

1. Discovery. Before any visual work starts, I read everything that's publicly available about you. Current site, social, listings, anything that's out there. The write-up captures voice, niche, market context, and what questions still need answering.
2. Archetype. After discovery, I write a one-sentence archetype that captures who you are. I use it to drive the visual decisions in the next phase. It stays in my process. You don't need to sign off on it. If something later doesn't feel right, the archetype is usually where the disconnect started, and we go back to it.
3. Visual directions and logo concepts. Three visual directions arrive together. One is bold and unexpected. One is closest to what you'd expect. One is stripped back to essentials. Each direction has a palette, typography, mood, and three logo concepts. You pick a direction. We move forward only in that lane.
4. Review. You see everything on a live preview link that works like a real website. The email comes with five short questions. Reply when you've had time to sit with it. No Zoom under pressure.
5. Brand deliverable pack. What's in the bundle scales by tier. Every tier ships a brand identity document and a brand one-pager reference, plus the basics: logo, color palette, type system, social cards, email signature. Standard adds a fuller logo system (6–8 variants), a social setup card, and post template references. Premium adds the full social toolkit: caption writing guide, content starter kit (25 posts and a 30-day calendar), plus business card and intake form templates. In every tier, you can hand the files to a future designer and they'll know what to do.
6. Website build. The site goes live on a preview URL for you to walk through page by page. You leave comments in plain English. Once you sign off, the site moves to your domain. The source files come with you when we're done.

Studios engagements ship in one to four weeks depending on tier. Standard is where most clients land: a four-to-five page custom site with a brand identity document, a social setup card, post templates, and the SEO/AEO scoped to the tier. Starter is the leanest version: one to three pages with the brand basics. Premium is the fuller picture, with the social toolkit and the small operational stuff (business cards, intake forms) ready to use on day one. Hosting setup, SEO/AEO foundation, legal pages, and an Edit-with-AI handoff so you can update copy yourself ship in every tier.

Labs · AI setup

What I built for myself.

The consulting practice is a one-person operation. The reason it ships at the prices and timelines on the rest of this site is the same reason I'd build a setup for you: AI doing the kind of work that used to eat my evenings.

Here's the real stack:

• A custom memory system in Claude Projects. Holds context across active engagements, meetings, and commitments I've made. When I open a project, I'm not starting from scratch.
• Personal AI agents. Handle research, drafting, meeting notes, and artifact prep. I edit; they don't ship for me.
• A small set of connectors. Calendar, Gmail, Google Drive, plus a couple of integrations to other apps. The AI acts on what it knows instead of just talking about it.
• Plain-text logs of how the setup performs week to week. When something breaks, I see it before clients do.

This pays for itself in hours saved every week. Those hours are why a one-person practice can take Studios projects to the level it does without burning out.

What a Diagnostic delivers.

A Diagnostic is a 90-minute call plus a three-to-five page written assessment of where AI fits in your business. $750, credited toward the next engagement if you book one within thirty days.

Here's what the written piece covers, by section:

1. What I heard. Two paragraphs summarizing your work, your team, where time disappears. Reflects back what you said on the call so we're working from the same picture.
2. Where AI helps, ranked. Two to four opportunities, ordered by impact and effort. Each one names the workflow and the tool that fits. No "transform your business" language. Just: this thirty-minute task can become a five-minute task, here's how.
3. Where AI doesn't help (or shouldn't). One paragraph drawing the line clearly. Some things should stay manual. Some workflows are better off without AI involvement at all. Naming both is what most AI consultants skip.
4. Tool recommendations. A short list with rough monthly costs. Commercial subscriptions you can keep running after we're done. No custom builds.
5. Next step. What I think the right next step is. If holding off entirely is the answer, that's in the assessment too. No pressure to keep going.

What an Ops Workflow ships.

After an Ops Workflow, three or four of the manual loops eating your week are running on their own: intake routing, scheduling glue, invoice follow-ups, meeting-notes-to-actions, whatever pattern actually applies. The deliverables: working automations (Zapier, n8n, or Make), Claude Projects for the human-judgment steps, a written runbook, and a walkthrough video.

And you own all of it. No platform gates you out of your own setup six months from now. Like the Studios work, Labs work ships with full documentation. Another consultant could pick up where I left off if you ever needed that.

Other Labs engagements (content systems, internal tools, custom workflows) start with a Diagnostic and get scoped from there. The price reflects what's actually getting built, not a fixed package.