Most small business owners have a job that is half running the business and half running the systems that run the business.
There is the work that gets you paid. There is the work that keeps you in compliance. There is the work that keeps your equipment running. There is the work of managing direct employees and the work of managing the contractors you rely on, the bookkeeper, the accountant, the marketing person, anyone who gets business through the door.
Most of those jobs take expertise the owner does not have. So they get outsourced, or done at midnight, or handed to the first hire who can take them on. The day is a mix of every kind of work at once.
Where AI (artificial intelligence) fits, and where it does not
Some owners have started using ChatGPT, or Claude, or Grok to help with parts of this.
That helps with the paperwork.
It also sends the proprietary parts of the business, the customer list, the supplier relationships, the procedures your team has built over years, into a system whose training process is opaque. This week, two mathematicians found out what that looks like. The same mechanism that lets a vendor train on a copyrighted book lets it train on the work that has taken you years to build.
You do not have to use the tools that way.
There is a different option
Open-source AI models that run on hardware you own.
A Mac Mini in the office, a Linux box in the back room, or a server you rent by the month.
Your data stays on your hardware, where the model is the model and your work never leaves your machine. Because there is no central training process, what happens to your work is not opaque. The skills the agent writes for itself stay in plain text files you can read.
This is what we build.
Who we are
I run a farm in Chatsworth, a small practice in north Georgia, and a fleet of Hermes agents that I use for both. The agent count changes every month, because the work changes.
Grant is in Chattanooga. He does the software side. He is the one writing the agents, building the integrations, debugging the deploys.
North Georgia and the I-75 corridor. Alpharetta, Chatsworth, Chattanooga, anywhere in between.
What we will and will not do
I do basic consulting. Pick one piece of work that has been on your list too long. I build a Hermes agent for it, on hardware you own, with your data staying on that hardware. I train your team and leave you with the runbook.
If you want someone to take over operations and run them with AI, that is not me. There are larger firms for that and I will say so on the first call.
Where to read more
The writing is at /blog: eight posts so far. The newer ones are about Hermes agents. The older ones on Substack are about a submarine, a startup that did not work, and a chicken farm.
Send a note
[email protected]. Tell us what you would take off your plate.