You're being asked to trust an outside system with access to how your business actually runs. These are the questions we'd ask in your position, answered directly rather than around.
What access do you need, and how is it scoped?
It depends on what we're doing. The Operational Reality Snapshot is read-only by design — up to three of your systems, nothing changed, nothing configured. A full engagement needs broader access, because the AI agents we build have to actually act inside your systems to do the work, but that access is scoped in writing, system by system, before anything starts, using the same governance model that runs the engagement itself: one owner and one autonomy class per task, and nothing granted outside what's named.
What happens to our data?
It stays where it already lives, in the systems you already run. The overlay we build sits on top of your stack — we aren't asking you to migrate anything into a platform we control. What we learn while running an engagement can feed back into refining our own methodology, but only as patterns, never as your raw data: nothing you give us trains anything for another company, and nothing leaves the engagement without your agreement.
Do we own what you build?
Yes. Everything we build inside your business is yours — the documentation, the configuration, the data, the agents as installed. When an engagement ends, you keep all of it; we keep only our methodology. No lock-in, by design. If you decide not to continue past a given phase, nothing you already have stops running and nothing has to be torn out — it was built to be inherited, not rented.
Do you replace our existing software?
No. The build rides on top of the systems you already run — whatever that stack actually is. We connect and orchestrate what's already there; we don't ask you to switch tools or move your data into something new just so we have a platform to sell you.
How long does an engagement take?
It depends on scope, and we'd rather say that plainly than hand you a number that stops meaning anything once we're actually inside your systems. The Operational Reality Snapshot has a fixed scope, so it gets a fixed date — agreed with you at scoping, once we know which systems are involved. A full build engagement is scoped and timed against your specific systems before anything starts. We commit to a timeline once we have sized the work, not before.
What if the AI gets something wrong?
Every task we build has exactly one owner and one autonomy class: things the system does on its own, things it drafts for a human to approve, and things it must never do without one. Anything with legal, financial, or compliance weight sits in the approval class by default. The failure mode is fixed on purpose: when something is missing, ambiguous, or a system is unreachable, the task stops and asks — it does not guess, and it does not proceed on an assumption to hit a deadline. That's a design decision, not a promise that nothing ever goes wrong; it's what determines how a wrong outcome gets caught before it costs you anything.
What size company is this for?
Service businesses roughly 10–30 team members and $1M–$5M in revenue — where the operation has gotten more complex than one person can hold in their head, but there isn't already an internal team doing this work. Below that range, there's usually not enough operational complexity yet to justify the engagement. Above it, you likely already have people running some version of this internally, and it's a different conversation.
How do you handle security and credentials?
Credentials are scoped to exactly the systems named in the agreed access, nothing wider, and access is revocable at any point in the engagement, not only at the end of it. We don't store credentials in plaintext. We don't hold a formal security certification today — we're a young company, and we'd rather tell you that directly than imply otherwise. What we can show you is the same thing the Audit step of the methodology produces for the engagement itself: a permanent, append-only record of what touched your systems and when.
What does it cost?
Engagements are quoted per scope, not off a rate card. Before anything starts, you get a fixed fee agreed for that scope — not an hourly meter, and no change orders inside it once it's set. We can't publish a number that means anything before we know what's in scope, and anyone who gives you one before that conversation is guessing.
What if we're not ready for a full engagement?
Start smaller. The Operational Reality Snapshot is a fixed-scope, fixed-fee diagnostic — up to three systems, three sessions, four deliverables — that shows you how your operation actually runs before you commit to anything bigger. It's also how we get to know your systems well enough to scope a larger engagement honestly, instead of guessing at it.