A fixed-price look at how your busy season runs and what AI or software would take off your staff. Two weeks, one document, ranked fixes with real numbers on them. We drive up from San Diego and do this in person.
Huntington Beach businesses live on a calendar. Downtown retail, the hotels and restaurants near the pier, rental and lesson operations, the event weekends that fill every room in town: a few months carry the revenue and the rest of the year spends it. The work that breaks under that pattern is scheduling, staffing and answering people.
In July a shop answers the same six questions two hundred times. Hours, parking, whether you rent to beginners, how long the wait is. One person with a phone handles all of it, and that person is usually the one who could have been selling. Then the shoulder season arrives, the schedule stays built for a crowd that did not show up, and nobody catches it until payroll.
The studio is in San Diego and Huntington Beach is about a two hour drive, so we plan the visit instead of dropping in. We come up for the walkthrough, spend the day with the people running the floor, and handle the rest by phone and email. Travel is included, and the fee does not change because you are north of the county line.
A surf and skate shop downtown. Between the website, Instagram messages and the phone, the same questions about sizing, hours and rentals arrive all day long. The audit counts them across one real week, then prices a single answer source that the staff and the website can both draw on.
A hotel or restaurant near the pier. Group bookings, catering requests and event inquiries land in three different inboxes, and the manager rebuilds a quote each time one shows up. We follow four of last summer's inquiries and price the difference between a blank page and a draft.
An action sports supplier with a small shop floor. Purchase orders from retailers arrive as email attachments in six formats, and production planning happens on a whiteboard. The audit measures what the retyping costs, and often finds the scheduling problem is worth more money than the AI one. That answer disappoints a few owners, and it costs them far less to act on.
The businesses this works for have real operations and roughly five to fifty people on the payroll. Seasonal headcount counts toward that. What matters is whether the same work repeats often enough to be worth building against.
If it is you and one other person, we send you off with the advice instead of an invoice: ChatGPT Plus, a scheduler and a good template. There is rarely enough repeated volume at that size to earn the fee back. That advice is free and it holds up.
The audit is $1,500 and the price is fixed before we start. It produces one document: how the business runs today, three to five ranked fixes with hours and build costs attached, what to leave alone, and a ninety day order of operations. Nobody is obligated to build any of it afterward.
This page was drafted from a structured outline and hand-reviewed before launch. The work itself is custom, owner-operated, never templated.
One paragraph about your business is enough. Or just email hola@xala.studio.