Most consulting engagements are described in vague phases ("strategy," "alignment," "rollout"). This page is the actual schedule. What gets delivered, when, by whom, with how much of your team's time. If something looks weird or missing, ask before you book.
No retainer, no on-going dependency, no never-ending engagement. Three discrete phases. Two clear decision points (proceed-to-Sprint and proceed-to-Implementation). You can stop after any one.
Goal: walk away with an honest read on whether the Sprint is the right next step for your shop. Not whether AI is "good" in the abstract — whether it's good for you, right now, given where your operation is.
No high-pressure close. Nobody's incentivized to push you into the Sprint. The Sprint is intentionally priced low so the decision is easy when it's right and easy to walk away from when it's wrong.
No fake urgency. No "we only have 2 client slots this month" because that's true (we do — solo practice has hard capacity limits) but we're not going to make it a closing tactic.
No bait-and-switch quote. The Sprint is $2,500 flat. The Implementation range is $8,500-$22,000 and we'll quote inside that range during the Sprint, not after.
Heavy lifting from us, four short syncs from you. Below is the actual schedule with deliverables and your time commitment.
If you proceed, here's what week-by-week looks like. Implementation is denser than the Sprint and your team's time investment goes up — but the payoff is systems live in your shop.
Full operational walk-through with your office team. CRM/social/Google Business deep credentials. Voice training: ~25 sample AI replies tuned and approved. First system architecture finalized.
Lead responder and (typically) social auto-poster live in shadow mode — generating replies that you review and approve before they send. We tune voice on the first 25-50 real replies.
Lead responder and social go fully autonomous. Review auto-requester and follow-up sequence deploy. AI receptionist (if scoped) goes live for after-hours.
Drone-fed estimator and storm-day activator deploy. Full team training (45 min, recorded). SOWs handed off, post-launch standby begins.
After day 45, the engagement transitions to standby. You operate the systems day-to-day. We're available for issues for 60 days at no cost. If you elect a quarterly tune-up after that, we run a 4-hour audit + adjustment for $800. Most shops don't need it.
Most consulting engagements understate this on purpose. We're going to overstate it slightly so you don't get blindsided.
Owner: kickoff (60 min) + mid-Sprint (30 min) + final (60 min) + ~30 min of async review. That's it.
Distributed across owner (~5 hrs), office manager (~3 hrs), crew leads (~2 hrs total). The bulk is voice tuning during week 1.
Reviewing the daily summary email + the occasional escalation. After month 3, most shops drop this to ~30 min/mo.
If your team genuinely cannot spare 8-10 hours over 30 days, the Implementation will not work. AI systems require operator buy-in to land — there's no version of this where we deploy in stealth and you discover it running smoothly without team input. We'll tell you this on the discovery call.
These come up often enough that we put them in writing. Especially the first three.
We integrate with your CRM. We do not become the operator of your CRM. You log in, you administer users, you control data. We have read-write access to specific objects (leads, contacts, jobs) and that's it.
The longest contract we'll sign is the Implementation SOW (one-time, ~6 weeks). Post-launch, you're free. No auto-renew, no cancellation penalties, no "minimum service period."
If the Sprint identifies that your shop only needs 2-3 systems, we'll ship 2-3 systems and quote accordingly. We will not pad the engagement to look more impressive.
The first 25-50 AI replies on every system run in shadow mode. You see and approve every one before it goes out. After we have voice locked, we go autonomous — but you've already signed off on the pattern.
If your shop runs on JobNimbus and you love it, we work with JobNimbus. If your shop runs on a custom Excel workflow and it actually works, we work with Excel. CRM switches are independent of AI deployment in 95% of cases.
The quoted price at Sprint end is the all-in price. Scope changes get re-quoted (and you can decline). There are no "platform fees," "API fees," or "AI compute fees" tacked on later — we eat those costs, not you.
We keep communication tight so it doesn't eat your time. Three channels, predictable cadence.
Default async tool. We post daily updates during Implementation, you ping when you need us, we respond same-day during business hours. If you don't use Slack, we use a shared email thread or whatever else works.
30-min Zoom every Wednesday during Implementation. Same time each week, recorded. You can skip if there's nothing to discuss — we'll send a written summary instead.
All Sprint and Implementation deliverables live in a shared Notion workspace you own. Versioned, searchable, accessible after the engagement ends. No PDFs trapped in someone's inbox.
Three exit ramps built into the process. We document them up front so you know they exist before you'd ever need to use one.
If at the final Sprint review you don't have a written 90-day plan you can act on, we refund the full $2,500. No questions, no clawback of the document, no quid pro quo.
Trigger: you say so. We don't make you justify it. If the work didn't deliver, we own that.
Track record: 0 refunds in 14 Sprints. We mention this not to pressure you against requesting one, but so you know the deliverable usually lands.
Every AI system we deploy ships with an instant-disable kill switch. One toggle, the AI stops responding. Manual workflow resumes. No lost data, no orphaned conversations.
Use cases: you want to take the system offline during a major event (CRM migration, ownership transition), the system starts acting weird (rare but possible after a vendor API change), or you just want a manual day for the team.
You operate the kill switches. We can flip them remotely if you ping us, but the controls live in your dashboard from day one.
60 days of standby is included with every Implementation. During that period, we respond to issues within 24 hours and tune the systems based on real-world data.
After 60 days, you can elect a quarterly tune-up ($800/4 hours) or end the engagement entirely. About 75% end the engagement; about 25% take the quarterly option. Both are normal. The quarterly tune-up is not a soft retainer — it's optional, and we don't push it.
Anonymized to protect the relationship. ~25 jobs/mo, GAF Master Elite, JobNimbus, 8-person crew. Names changed; numbers and timeline are real.
Owner reached out via the playbook page. 30-min call walked through the operation. Identified that lead response was the biggest leak (avg 6+ hrs). Sprint quoted at $2,500. Owner signed within 24 hours.
Audit revealed: 47% of leads went cold within first 24 hours. Voice direction set: casual-professional, signed by "Marcus" (real lead inspector). Priority order: lead responder → review auto-requester → social auto-poster → quote follow-up. Implementation quoted at $14,500.
JobNimbus integration completed. Voice training on 32 sample replies. Owner approved voice on day 5. Shadow mode launched day 7 — AI generates replies, owner approves before sending.
Day 10: lead responder went fully autonomous. Saturday night, 9:47 PM — AI replied to a Briarforest Facebook lead, qualified, booked Monday inspection. That one job covered 60% of the engagement cost.
Review auto-requester sent first batch to 30 days of completed jobs — 11 new Google reviews in week 3 alone. Social auto-poster launched. Quote follow-up sequence armed.
Storm-day activator wired to NWS Houston feeds. Full-team training session (45 min, recorded). 60-day standby began.
Close rate up 34% on inbound. ~8 more jobs/mo recovered. 5× monthly Google review velocity. Top-3 local pack ranking achieved at month 5. Owner declined quarterly tune-up — operating systems independently.
The full 12-min playbook — same one we send to every Sprint client. ROI math, vendor checklist, ready-to-use SMS templates, 30-day rollout plan.
About a third of Sprint clients don't proceed to Implementation with Riptide. They take the deliverables and execute on their own, hire a freelance developer, or shelve the plan and revisit in 6-12 months. Any of those is fine. There's no upsell pressure, no proceed-or-lose-discount nonsense. The Sprint is priced to stand alone.
Common, expected, and addressable. We've never had an Implementation derailed by team resistance, but we have rescoped engagements when team buy-in was missing. The 45-min training session and shadow-mode rollout are specifically designed to bring resistant team members along. If your office manager hates AI on day 1, she will likely tolerate it by day 14 and be skeptical-but-using-it by day 30. The key is that the AI replaces no one's job — it just removes the parts of their job they hated.
You do. Every prompt, every configuration, every documentation file is delivered as your IP at the end of the engagement. You can take it elsewhere, modify it, hand it to another vendor, or sit on it. We do not retain ownership of anything we build for you, and we do not require licensing or per-seat fees to keep using what we delivered.
Almost always yes. We've integrated with JobNimbus, AcculynX, Roofr, ServiceTitan, CompanyCam, EagleView, Xactimate, Symbility, HubSpot, Salesforce, GoHighLevel, Hatch, GoLeads, Podium, BirdEye, Google Local Service Ads, Facebook Lead Ads, and a long tail of niche tools. If you have something we haven't seen, we'll review it during Discovery and tell you honestly whether integration is reasonable in scope.
Two pages. Page 1: scope, deliverables, milestones, price, payment terms, and the kill-switch clause. Page 2: standard MSA boilerplate (warranties, indemnity, IP ownership, term, governing law). It's plain English, signed in DocuSign in under 5 minutes. If you have your own MSA template, we'll sign yours instead. We don't get cute with contract language.
Fair question for a solo practice. The mitigation is that everything we build is your IP, hosted on infrastructure you own (your CRM, your AI provider account, your Notion workspace). If Riptide disappeared tomorrow, you'd still have working AI systems and the documentation to operate them. You'd lose the post-launch standby support but the systems themselves keep running.
The systems are built to accommodate normal evolution — adding a new ZIP code, expanding a service line, adjusting pricing. For minor changes you can self-serve in the dashboard. For larger changes (new vertical, new state, new CRM), the quarterly tune-up is the right vehicle. For major changes (acquisition, multi-shop rollout), we'd scope a separate small engagement.
60 days of standby is included with every Implementation. During that period, we respond to issues within 24 hours and tune the systems based on real-world data. After 60 days, you can elect a quarterly tune-up ($800/4 hours) or end the engagement entirely. About 75% end the engagement; about 25% take the quarterly option.
Book a 30-minute discovery call. Walk through your operation. Get an honest fit-check by end of day. Decide whether to Sprint with as much information as you'd want.