Solution Studio — Practical AI for small business. Since 2012.

01 The problem

Everyone's telling you to “use AI.” Nobody's telling you how.

“I have ChatGPT open in a tab. I don't know what to do with it.”

You've heard the warnings. You've watched the YouTube videos. You've maybe even paid for three different AI subscriptions. And your business still runs the same way it did 18 months ago — except now you feel guilty about it.

Consultants quote $20k engagements
You don't need a transformation. You need someone to build one thing for you next Tuesday.
Courses sit unfinished
You bought the $497 course. You watched module one. It's been six weeks.
Tools pile up, ROI doesn't
$80 here, $30 there. Subscriptions you forgot you had. Workflows that never quite came together.
Your team is flying blind
They're using ChatGPT in ways you don't know about — and probably shouldn't.

02 What we build

Small, useful things that make your Tuesday easier.

A sample of what we build. Not flashy. Not transformational. Just small, durable things that quietly save your team 4–8 hours a week, every week.

Finance · Accounting

Bank statements to monthly Excel summary

Drop a PDF in a folder. Get a categorized P&L spreadsheet by the end of the day, with anomalies flagged.

→ Saves ~6 hrs/month

Sales · Outreach

Personalized cold email at scale

Upload a prospect list. Each gets a custom first line based on their LinkedIn, company news, and recent posts.

→ Saves ~10 hrs/week

Operations

Meeting recordings to action items

Zoom recording in. Action items, decisions, and CRM-ready notes out — routed to the right person automatically.

→ Saves ~5 hrs/week

Customer service

Inbox triage & draft responses

AI sorts your inbox by priority overnight and drafts replies to common questions. You review and send in 15 min.

→ Saves ~8 hrs/week

Marketing

Content from your past work

Trained on your voice, your past posts, and your wins. Drafts LinkedIn posts and newsletters that actually sound like you.

→ Saves ~6 hrs/week

Proposals · Quotes

Discovery call to branded proposal

Recorded discovery call goes in. A polished, branded, on-pricing proposal comes out within an hour.

→ Saves ~4 hrs/proposal

HR · Hiring

Resume screening & first-pass shortlist

Resumes pile in. AI ranks the top 10 against your criteria and drafts personalized "moving forward" or "not this time" emails.

→ Saves ~6 hrs per role

Operations · AP

Vendor invoice processor

Forward any invoice to a dedicated email. Line items, vendor, due date, and GL code extracted and pushed to QuickBooks.

→ Saves ~4 hrs/week

Sales · CRM

CRM hygiene & follow-up flagger

Scans your pipeline weekly. Stale deals get a contextual follow-up email drafted from your call notes, ready to review.

→ Saves ~5 hrs/week

Customer success

Review monitor & response drafter

Watches Google, Yelp, and industry sites. New review comes in, AI drafts a response in your voice. You review and send.

→ Saves ~3 hrs/week

Marketing · Intel

Competitor watch brief

Weekly digest of what your top 5 competitors did — new pages, posts, pricing changes, hiring patterns. Inbox every Monday.

→ Saves ~3 hrs/week

Legal · Admin

Contract red-line summarizer

Drop in a contract someone sent you. Non-standard clauses, unusual terms, and missing protections flagged in plain English.

→ Saves ~2 hrs per contract

Finance · Bookkeeping

Expense categorization & close prep

Connects to your business cards. Transactions categorized by pattern, personal-vs-business flagged, monthly packet ready for your bookkeeper.

→ Saves ~6 hrs/month

Customer service

FAQ & knowledge base auto-builder

Watches your support inbox. Repeat questions become FAQ entries and help docs — written from your actual answers.

→ Saves ~4 hrs/month

Project management

Weekly client status reports

Connects to Slack, Asana, or Notion. Every Friday, a client-facing status update is drafted from the week's activity.

→ Saves ~2 hrs/client/week

Compliance

Annual deadline tracker & filing prep

Annual reports, BOI filings, license renewals, sales tax. State-specific deadlines tracked, 30-day warnings, prep drafted.

→ Saves ~4 hrs/year + late penalties

03 How it works

A real person. A real plan. Real things built for you.

Step 01

The audit

We start with a 60-minute call. We learn your business, your tools, your time-sinks. You leave with a written roadmap of 5–10 automations ranked by impact — yours to keep whether you sign up or not.

Step 02

The build

Each month, you submit one automation request. We scope it, build it, and deliver with a Loom walkthrough. Your team uses it. You stop thinking about it.

Step 03

The community

Slack access, monthly office hours, and a library of pre-built templates. Real owners sharing what's working — without the LinkedIn theatre.

A note from a client

I went from feeling completely behind on AI to having three workflows running on autopilot in six weeks. The best part — I don't have to think about any of it.

Jamie M.

Owner, regional marketing agency

04 The math

What does an AI leader actually cost?

Hiring AI leadership in-house is expensive and slow. DIY tools without strategy is cheap and ineffective. A fractional Chief AI Officer sits exactly where most small businesses need to land.

Option

Annual cost

What you get

Full-time AI lead In-house hire

$180–240k

Salary, benefits, equipment, taxes. 4–6 month hiring cycle. Hard to find, harder to retain.

AI consultant $200–400/hr

$36–60k

Hourly engagements with no continuity. They tell you what to build, you still have to build it.

DIY tool stack ChatGPT, Zapier, Make, etc.

$2.4–6k

Tools without strategy or implementation. Subscriptions you forgot you had. Workflows that never came together.

Solution Studio Builder Fractional CAIO + monthly builds

From $199 per month

A real human Chief AI Officer embedded in your business. Strategy, builds, and answers — on retainer.

Get AI expertise that positions your business for today — and tomorrow.

05 Pricing

Three tiers. No surprises.

Pay monthly, cancel anytime. Annual plans get two months free. Every tier starts with a free audit and a written roadmap.

Foundation

$199 / month

CAIO Lite — for owners who want to learn first

Strategic AI guidance, education, and community. Get the playbook and the people — build at your own pace.

Full curriculum: AI 101 → advanced
Private Slack community
Twice-monthly group office hours
Library of 30+ ready-to-deploy templates
Annual 1-on-1 strategy call

Start with Foundation

Service businesses with no time to figure it out.

You're past survival. You're profitable. You're too small for an internal ops person and too sharp to pay $250/hour for a consultant who builds nothing.

Most of our clients do $500k–$5M in revenue with 5–30 employees. They tend to look like this:

Marketing & creative agencies

Accounting & bookkeeping firms

Small law practices

Real estate teams

E-commerce brands

Independent contractors

Healthcare & therapy practices

Consultants & coaches

07 A note from us

Solution Studio has been quietly helping small businesses since 2012. AI is the first technology in a decade that actually changes what's possible.

Over the years we've watched a lot of “next big things” come and go. Websites, then social, then funnels, then no-code, then crypto. Most were noise. AI isn't.

But the conversation around it has gotten unbearable. Every podcast tells you AI will replace your business. Every LinkedIn feed has a 22-year-old “AI expert” selling a $1,997 course. Every tool promises to be the last one you'll need.

Meanwhile actual small business owners are tired, a little scared, and not sure who to ask. They don't need a transformation. They need someone who'll spend two hours a month with them and quietly make their Tuesday a little easier.

That's what this is. A subscription to a real person who knows the tools, builds the small things, and tells you the truth — including when AI isn't the answer.

— The Solution Studio team

Real humans · est. 2012

08 Common questions

A few honest answers.

Don't see your question? Just ask us directly.

No. Courses ask you to do the work. We do the work for you. The curriculum is included if you want to learn, but our actual product is the automations we build for you each month.

We'll tell you. About 30% of the “AI” problems we hear are actually tool selection problems — you need a better CRM or a real bookkeeping service, not AI. We'd rather save you money than sell you something that won't work.

A single workflow with up to about 5 connected steps. Most builds take us 2–4 hours. We scope it together on the strategy call so there are no surprises. Larger builds become Partner-tier projects.

We use enterprise-tier AI providers with strict no-training policies, sign mutual NDAs by default, and follow least-privilege access for any tools we touch. For regulated industries (healthcare, finance, legal) we use HIPAA-eligible and SOC 2 compliant providers only.

Yes. Month-to-month, no contracts, cancel anytime. The automations we build for you are yours — we leave you with documentation so you (or anyone else) can maintain them.

Consultants charge $200–$400/hour and tell you what to do. We charge a flat monthly fee and actually build it for you. Same outcome, fraction of the cost, no project-based bullshit.

Practical AI for businesses that need things to actually work.