Questions we get asked.

We build the operating system a small business should have had all along, and then we leave it with you. Three things in sequence: we find where your money and your hours are going, we write your business down (the processes, the rules, the exceptions that live only in your head), and we build an AI assistant that runs on it. Yours, in your accounts, documented well enough that you could fire us and lose nothing.

No. There is nothing to subscribe to and no dashboard to learn. We are a firm. We do the work, install it in accounts you own, and hand it over. You will end up using tools, and they will be tools you chose and pay for directly, which keep working whether or not we are in the picture.

No. The hardest thing we ask you to do is talk. Most of the Architect phase is you narrating your own work on a screen recording, doing the thing you already do while saying why you do it that way. We take that apart and write it down.

Both founders. Nichole leads the engagement and the findings, Steve builds and delivers. Nothing reaches you that we have not both reviewed by hand. That limits how many clients we take at once, and we would rather say so.

That is where we started, because we ran a fifty-door property management company ourselves and know where those businesses leak. The method is not specific to it. Where do the hours go, what is only in your head, what breaks when you step away: the questions are the same for a travel agency or a trades business. If you are outside hospitality, tell us what you do and we will say honestly whether we are a fit.

A paid diagnostic, and the only thing anyone buys first. You send us your documents. We go through the whole business, the money, the operations, and how work comes in, and give you back a scorecard, a leak list with dollar figures attached, a readiness assessment, and a proposal for the build: the whole project, planned in order and priced.

The leak list is the point. Owner-run businesses leak money in places the owner cannot see from inside: a cleaning fee that stopped covering the clean two years ago, a channel taking 18% that deserves 3, an account that costs more to serve than it pays.

One price for the whole business. It is the only price we publish.

$1,500

The whole business, one price

Half the fee credits toward your first build if you start within 60 days of delivery. If you do not go ahead, you keep the findings and owe us nothing further.

We do not discount the Audit. It is judgment work, and it is the purchase that decides whether anything else makes sense.

Because a free audit is a sales meeting with a spreadsheet attached. Analysis that is given away gets paid for out of whatever the firm wants to sell you next, which means it has a job besides being true.

Ours is priced as work because it is work. Your documents read, your numbers recomputed, both founders' judgment applied, every figure traceable to something you sent us. It also ends in a fork we are willing to take: some businesses get told to fix their structure before buying an assistant from us. A free audit has no reason to write that sentence.

An intake form and a pile of documents. The form takes about 45 minutes and saves as you go, so you can stop halfway and pick it up on your phone. The documents are whatever you already have. A P&L or an accounting export, whatever your operating software will give us, a list of your subscriptions.

Any access you grant is read-only, scoped to what we need, and revoked the day the audit is delivered.

Then that is a finding, and probably an important one. Every document we ask for has an “I don’t have it” and an “I don’t track this” option beside it, and both of those count as answers. A gap tells us something a tidy spreadsheet would not. Do not clean anything up for us. The messy version is more useful.

The clock starts when your documents are in, not when you pay. From there it is about two weeks to findings and a review call on your calendar. If something we need is missing, we will ask once, and tell you what changes if we never get it.

Then it says so, in writing, and tells you what to fix first. An AI assistant built for a business whose processes exist only in one person's memory is an expensive assistant that guesses. The audit ends in one of two findings, structure first or ready to build, and we will give you the first one when it is true.

No. It is non-refundable once the engagement is signed, because the work starts immediately and most of it happens before you see anything. What you get in place of a refund is the 50% credit toward the build, and findings you keep either way.

We scope and quote the build from the audit rather than from a menu, because the honest price depends on how much of your business is already written down. That is the main reason the audit comes first. The audit ends with a proposal for the whole project, so you find out what you would be buying, and what it costs, before you decide.

Because what we build depends on what the audit finds. Pricing a build before we've seen the business would mean guessing, and you'd pay for the guess.

No, and plenty of people will not. If the audit is the only thing you ever buy from us, you will still know where your money and your hours are going. There is no subscription attached to it and no pitch inside the findings.

You do, all of it, from the first day. Every account is opened in your name, every document lives in your storage, every tool is billed to your card. We work inside your accounts as guests. There is no Salto platform holding your operation, because there is no Salto platform.

Nothing stops. Everything keeps running.

The written-down version of your business is a folder of documents in your storage. Your assistant lives in software you pay for. The reports, the systems and the documentation are already yours, so offboarding is us removing our own access while you watch.

If you are on Care and you cancel it, one thing changes: the things that used to arrive on a schedule stop arriving on a schedule, and go back to running when you ask for them. That is the whole consequence.

We build it this way deliberately. The last letter of the method stands for Own, and we take it literally. A firm that is confident in its work should engineer its own goodbye.

During the audit, you grant read-only access scoped to what we need, and it is revoked at delivery. Nothing you send us appears in anything we publish without your written permission, and anything we do publish is de-identified.

We use AI systems in the analysis and in the build. The engagement agreement discloses what they process and what they do not.

Every build gets tested in your environment before handoff, with you watching. After go-live there is a 30-day window inside the build price where we fix anything that does not work as specified. After that you can call us for a one-off, or take Care if you would rather have someone watching it monthly. Care sits after the handoff on purpose: a choice you make once you already own the thing, never a condition of getting it.

Not an outcome guarantee. We cannot honestly promise your revenue will move by a specific percentage, and a firm that does has either guessed or defined the number so it cannot lose.

Here is what the agreement commits us to. The scope is fixed before you sign. Delivery means the findings and the review call both happened. Everything we build sits in your accounts, documented well enough that another person could run it. If a build does not do what the scope says it does, we fix it.

Partly. The model is the cheap part, and most people already have access to one. Far fewer have given theirs anything to read.

An assistant that has read your pricing rules, your exceptions, your owner agreements and your never-do list gives your answer. One that has not gives a plausible answer.

Only where you decide it should, and that decision gets made deliberately. Most of what we build drafts and waits. You approve, then it sends. Trust gets extended the way you would extend it to a new hire: gradually, in writing, one category at a time.

Whatever is on your never-do list, which we write with you. Ours starts in the usual place. Nothing touching money moves without a human. No refunds, no pricing exceptions, no first conversation with a new customer, no apology.

When it does not know something, it says so instead of improvising. That behavior is written into the spec.

Sometimes it will be. Anyone selling you a system that is never wrong is selling you one you have not watched closely enough yet. The design question is which mistakes can happen unsupervised, and the answer is the cheap ones. That is why the approval model exists and why money is on the never-do list.

It depends on how much of your business is already written down, which is what the audit measures. We do not publish a fixed number of weeks. A short guaranteed window pushes the work toward a shallow extraction, and the depth is what makes the assistant useful afterward.

You get a timeline with your scope, before you commit.

North Carolina. The work is remote: screen recordings, calls, shared documents. It is the same way we ran a fifty-door operation from six time zones away, at about an hour a day.

Book a call. If it is a fit, the next step is the audit. If it is not, we will tell you that instead.