The Flipped Script, Get over the Wall!

What I currently sell: nothing yet, which is sort of the point. I run ops at a homebuilder and I've been building AI stuff internally for a couple of years. In my head what I'd sell is the build, skills, workflows, agent setups, the folder architecture. All the stuff I'm proud of and none of it is what anyone would actually pay for.

The client problem: somebody senior spends hours every month assembling a report by hand out of three or four systems that don't talk to each other. It's not hard work, it's just tedious and it has to be right, so it lands on the person whose time is worth the most. That's the shape of it everywhere I look, and most people have stopped noticing it because it's just how the month goes.

The outcome I could sell instead: our cost-to-complete report used to take about two hours per house close. It's fifteen minutes now. We closed roughly 47 houses in the ten months to May, so that's around 98 hours a year back, and it scales with growth. Nobody needs to know how it works to care about that.

How I'd structure it: a small paid pilot on one report, priced against what they'd pay a vendor or what it costs to have someone do it by hand. Then a retainer if it holds up. I'm not chasing a share of revenue on the first one, because hours saved is clean and attributable and revenue isn't. If ten other things moved that quarter, the client knows it and so do I.

What would change: right now if I did this hourly, they'd be watching the clock and I'd be justifying it. If the number is the thing we agreed on, we're both looking at the same number instead of at each other. It also changes what I'm allowed to say no to, because anything that doesn't move that metric is out of scope and we both already know it.

Why this makes sense for me: I've been leading with mechanism because I used to be a science teacher and explaining how something works is my default. That's exactly wrong when somebody is deciding whether to hire you. They want the problem gone, they don't want the lesson. I've got the proof already...

Anyone else in this boat? I gotta get over the wall!

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The Flipped Script, Get over the Wall!