Who do you call when the problem is between two vendors?

Start with the one that stings

• "Honestly? Everything's a bit broken and it all runs through me."
  The business grew past the systems under it, and you are the reason none of it has collapsed.
  → The Walkthrough

  Why this happens

• "Calls after five go to voicemail. Whoever picks up signs the client."
  Nobody has timed your front door, so nobody knows when it is closed.
  → Front Door Check
• "Two systems don't talk, so someone retypes everything."
  A seam nobody owns, with a person standing in it.
  → Make two systems talk
• "Everyone I pay says their part works fine."
  They are probably all right. The gap between them is unowned.
  → Second Opinion
• "Staff pay for their own AI accounts. I don't know what's in them."
  Client information is leaving through tools you cannot see.
  → AI Ground Rules
• "We bought the software. Nobody uses half of it."
  You are paying for capacity nobody switched on.
  → Where the Day Goes
• "Quotes take me three nights a week, and half never get followed up."
  You are the bottleneck in your own sales process.
  → One Thing, Fixed Properly
• "Everyone asks me. Nothing moves without me."
  What you know has never been written down.
  → Make It Run Without You

  Why this happens

→ What this looks like in a law office

Most of this is not about AI

Most of what we do for a business your size is ordinary technology work done properly: the phone, the network, the systems that should talk to each other, the numbers you need to trust, the vendor charging you for something nobody uses.

AI is one tool among many, and often not the one that costs least. Where it helps we will set it up and prove it paid. Where it does not, we will tell you that too — which is the part nobody else says out loud.

A firm willing to say "AI is not your problem right now" is the firm you should believe when it says AI would help.

Will this cost people their jobs?

It is the first thing we get asked, and it deserves a real answer rather than a reassurance.

The largest study we know of that used payroll records rather than a survey compared 1,593 small businesses that adopted AI with 669 comparable businesses that had not. A year later the adopters had grown headcount about 7% more than the others — and under ten employees, about 10% more, which is roughly one extra hire at a nine-person business. The strongest sector of all was health care and social assistance, where practices under ten employees grew nearly 20% more.

The roles they added were hands-on and customer-facing: technicians, administrative support, people who see patients. Not technologists.

Gusto, September 2026 — payroll records, not a survey. Vendor-produced and labeled as such, and it is the best data of its kind that exists.

We will not promise you that outcome. What we will do is tell you, in writing, which parts of a job a change actually touches, before you decide anything.

How we work

Fixed pieces, not a retainer you cannot get out of. Every engagement has an end.

We name the number before we start, so you can tell whether it worked.

We do the piece that needs doing, we prove it works, and we hand it back. Running it afterwards stays with you — often the provider you already have, now with a specification to hold them to.

The quote is fixed before work starts, and it is named after we have seen the work, not before.

Where we stop

We are not an IT provider. No help desk, no break/fix, no on-call, no monitoring contracts, no reselling software or hardware, no managed services — not now, not later.

Those are real businesses and some of them are good ones. They are also the businesses whose advice we are sometimes asked to check, and you cannot check a bill you are also sending.

What we do instead: decide what should exist and why, run the project, hold the vendors to it with evidence rather than opinion, measure what changed, and hand it over.

Where we are

Anacay is early. We would rather say that than imply a roster we do not have.

What is not early is the record behind the work: twenty-five years of it, set out in full, with the evidence, for anyone who wants to check.