A fixed-price look at how your business runs and where AI or software would actually save you money. Two weeks, one document, a ranked list with the hours attached. The studio is here, so this happens in person.
The county's economy runs on a few dozen industries at once. Biotech and device firms in Sorrento Valley, defense contractors and their suppliers, tourism operators downtown and on the coast, breweries in North Park and Miramar, and several thousand owner-led service companies that quietly keep all of it running. Different products, and underneath, the same back office.
That back office is where the money goes. Somebody retypes a quote into the accounting system. Somebody answers the same customer question for the ninth time this week. Somebody builds the monthly report by hand from four exports. None of it shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it never gets fixed.
The audit puts a number on it. We sit with you and the two or three people who actually do the work, follow a job from the first phone call to the paid invoice, and write down where the hours disappear. Then we rank what is worth fixing, with what each fix would cost to build. You get a decision, not a sales pitch.
A Kearny Mesa contractor. Two office staff spend most of their week turning site photos and rough notes into estimates. The audit follows one estimate end to end, finds the four steps that are pure retyping, and prices the tool that would carry them. The recommendation might be a $9,000 build, or it might be that their existing software already does this and nobody was trained on it.
A Sorrento Valley lab supplier. Orders arrive by email in six different formats. Somebody reads each one and keys it into the system. We measure how many hours that is per month, what an intake step would cost, and whether the error rate justifies it before anyone writes code.
A tourism operator on the bay. Bookings come from three channels that do not talk. The owner reconciles them nightly. The audit usually finds this is a connection problem rather than an AI problem, and says so, which is cheaper for everyone.
We take on established businesses with real operations, roughly five to fifty people, where the owner is still close enough to the work to answer questions about it. We need access to the people doing the work, not just a conversation with the founder.
We do not take on one or two person businesses. There is rarely enough repeated work to justify the fee, and the honest recommendation is usually ChatGPT Plus, a scheduler and a good template. We would rather say that before you pay us than after.
The audit is $1,500 and fixed. If it finds nothing worth building, we say so and you keep the document. Nobody is obligated to build anything, and we are not the only shop that can do the work it recommends.
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.