The proposal, in full.

Confirmation, not a new pitch.

You and I have met twice. This document is the confirmation of what we talked about on April 20, not a new pitch. If anything in here doesn't match what you heard me say, say so — the proposal is wrong, not you.

The engagement, in one paragraph.

I step in as Top Notch Products' CTO on a 3–6 month retainer, operating as a fractional executive — not an employee. External title is CTO; internally we'll call it Interim CTO to keep the temporary framing clear. I report to you. I handle the technology decisions, the vendor conversations (Blue Link, Repzo, FreightPOP, Docuware, the office-move IT quotes), and the rollout of AI automation against the operations bottlenecks you've named.

Why I'm a fit.

I am a Danvers resident, featured as a “natural entrepreneur in the AI innovation realm” in Northern Essex Community College's Fall 2023 alumni magazine. I run ExecuServices from Beverly, MA — a practitioner-led IT firm focused on automations and AI integrations. Before ExecuServices, I was Director of IT at SwervePoint — a wholesale-distribution and corporate-swag business structurally similar to Top Notch — where I championed enterprise integrations for Fidelity, Dell, HubSpot, and the NFL, and was the sole technical contact on BlackRock. The last two years I've spent refining a 3-layer deterministic orchestration pattern now running across six live production systems. It's the same pattern that will drive your AP reconciliation, your quote sheets, and your exception detection.

What this isn't.

I am not replacing Blue Link. I am not migrating QuickBooks. I am not running your warehouse. I am not your help desk. I am not hiring people for you. Those are real projects for a different conversation — see §G, Scope boundaries.

Five things you said on April 20 that I can't stop thinking about.

1. 01

   “The greatest need is operations.”

   You said this — and then again, in different words on April 20:

   Operations is so laborious in our company… the part of the company where we are losing the battle the most, even though I have the best team. They are spending so much time key entering, comparing stuff, working with systems that don't talk to each other.

   That's the lede. Everything in Phase 1 centers there.

2. 02

   On what exception detection actually looks like.

   I just want a chart that says the packing list says you're supposed to have 24 of this. But you've got 20. That's all I want.

   Not dashboards, not BI reports — a one-line answer to one question, delivered when it matters. Lynn shouldn't have to re-derive it by comparing four PDFs. The Claude-based multi-doc pilot is Phase 1 work.

3. 03

   “It took two weeks to get all the quote sheets done this year.”

   Fifty customers, thirty of them with regular pricing, one trade show. Each customer needs a custom deck. Each deck is Blue Link → Excel → PowerPoint → logo → email. By end of Phase 1 that's a form and a button.

4. 04

   “It was unbelievable how much they had to come to me to get information.”

   February, when you were sick. You used the word “terrifying.” Janine, Jennifer, Suzanne — decades of institutional knowledge, no documented process. This is not a technology problem first; it is a documentation problem that technology accelerates. Phase 2 is the Janine operating manual.

5. 05

   “They'll be managing the SOP. They won't be managing the actual job.”

   This is the line you gave me that I am building the entire engagement around. Automation solidifies every team member's role — it moves them from doing the work to owning the process. No one gets replaced. Everyone's work gets leveraged. Janine's twenty-five years become documented assets she still owns. Jennifer moves from post-show reconciliation to real-time exception management. Pete's operations leadership is amplified.

The team this work centers on, by name.

Spellings locked the way you spell them.

Consulting engagement, CTO scope.

Title

CTO externally (vendors, email signature, LinkedIn). Interim CTO internally (with you), to preserve the consulting framing.

Reports to

You.

Authority

Directs technology decisions and vendor relationships on Top Notch's behalf. Blue Link, Repzo, FreightPOP, Docuware, the office-move IT quotes, any tool subscription under $500/mo without needing approval.

Not authority

Day-to-day people management. That stays with you. I work with your team; they don't report to me.

Term

Initial 3-month engagement, month-to-month after (except Option 3's 6-month commitment). 30-day written notice either way.

Legal form

Consulting engagement. SOW with defined scope and deliverables. Not an employment relationship.

Rhythm, retainer, routine.

E.1   Phases and rhythm

• Months 1–2 (intensive ramp): 4 days/week. Mondays and Tuesdays on-site (the anchor), Wednesdays remote build day, Thursdays remote synthesis + client planning, Fridays flexible. Heavy bias toward observation in the first two weeks — I'm learning your business, not building yet. Shipping starts around week 3.
• Months 3–6 (operating cadence): stepping down to 2.5 days/week on average. Mondays and Tuesdays on-site remain the anchor. Wednesdays become remote build days. The tapered phase is when automation rolls out across departments and Phase 2 SOPs land.
• Office-move observation window: the pre-move month is gold for discovery. Every manual workaround, every SOP that only lives in someone's head, every tool nobody's sure why you're still paying for — the move forces it all to the surface. Option 2 (“Pre-move start”) is recommended precisely because of this.

E.2   Retainer mechanics (lives in the SOW)

• Billing: monthly invoice. Weekly 30–60 min check-in with Kathy to start, stepping down to bi-weekly once rhythm is set. On on-site days, open availability for informal daily syncs (run-of-day first thing, run-of-recap at EOD) if you want them.
• Rollover: up to 25% of the month's hours carry forward; expire at end of the following month.
• Soft overage absorption: up to 15% over the monthly target absorbed into the retainer — no surprise bills.
• Hard overage: beyond 15%, billed at $225/hr with a written Monday heads-up the week it's forecast to trigger. No surprise invoices, ever.
• Team-member hours: all-inclusive in the retainer. If my team assists on delivery, those hours don't bill separately. Guardrail: >20 hrs/mo triggers a written scope-check email to you — visibility, not a charge.

E.3   Travel (explicit, routine policy)

• Direct expenses at cost: mileage, tolls, parking, hotel if overnight. Receipts on the invoice. No markup.
• Transit time at 50% of standard hourly: drive/fly/train time bills at half rate.
• On-site day at standard day rate: whether or not the retainer would otherwise cover it.
• Applies to: Danvers on-site days once travel is non-trivial, Wisconsin warehouse visits, trade-show attendance if requested.
• Does not apply to: normal Boston-area commute during the pre-move window — baked into Tier 1 on-site days already.

E.4   AI expenses

• Top Notch's AI accounts (Claude team, Gemini Pro, the AI workspace we eventually pick) stay on your bill. I use them for day-to-day work on your behalf.
• My AI accounts stay on my bill, absorbed into the retainer. No line item.
• Trigger clause: if file volume or processing scope escalates materially on Top Notch's behalf (thousands of historical documents, sustained high-token work), I'll propose moving heavy workloads onto your team plan at the maximum tier so batch work runs on your account. Written notice before anything changes.

Three phases. Named outcomes. Adjusted against reality.

Not carve-outs. Protection against hidden cost.

Not a list of “not included” carve-outs. A CTO is general-scope — if a problem belongs on a CTO's desk, I handle it. Three categories instead, framed as protecting you from hidden cost: everything in the baseline is covered at the retainer, everything in the middle is covered if capacity permits at the same retainer, and everything in the last category is a legitimate future project that gets its own scope and its own budget so it doesn't silently eat this one.

The math that makes the fee feel small.

Direct labor recovered (conservative, per your words)

Indirect savings (the numbers you don't get elsewhere)

• Principal time reclaimed from vendor calls. I handle Blue Link, Repzo, FreightPOP, Docuware, and any new-vendor conversation under the CTO hat. You stop being the technical escalation point. Conservative estimate at 2–4 hrs/week of your time × a $150/hr loaded principal rate = ~$25,000/yr reclaimed. This compounds — every hour you're not on a vendor call is an hour on what actually needs you.
• Cost of choosing the wrong firm. A 3-month engagement with a firm that doesn't understand wholesale distribution or SMB dynamics typically runs $45–75k with nothing durable at the end (slide decks, strategy memos, no shipped automations, no documented SOPs, no trained team). The SOP-as-we-go throughline is the guardrail here — every dollar billed produces an owned asset, not billable hours and a parting handshake.
• Institutional-knowledge insurance. No dollar estimate given, by design — impossible to quantify honestly before a SPOF event. Framed explicitly as the reason you stopped sleeping in February, and the reason the Phase 2 Janine work is non-negotiable.

The three opening-phase options again

Same table as the summary view, reproduced here for completeness.

Track record, not firm voice.

Validation

I was profiled in Northern Essex Community College's Fall 2023 alumni magazine — alumNECC, Vol 25 — in a feature titled “NECC Alumni Embrace AI: A Look at the Frontlines of a Booming Industry.” The article names me as “a natural entrepreneur in the AI innovation realm” and describes my work building AI tools across multiple industries. (source)

I was also the featured expert on the March 2025 episode of Adventures in Legal Tech (“Site Unseen”), speaking on AI's effect on web platforms and what makes modern business tooling actually usable. (source)

Most relevant: I live in Danvers. Your new office is ten minutes from my desk. Local isn't a marketing bullet — it's a practical one. On-site days are on-site days, not half-days lost to Boston traffic.

Proof of capability — three systems that map directly to your work

Prior enterprise track record — directly relevant to Top Notch

Before ExecuServices, I spent years as Director of IT at SwervePoint — a corporate-swag, wholesale-distribution, and warehousing business. The business model is structurally very similar to Top Notch Products: multi-customer wholesale orders, inventory-heavy operations, and a sales team that lives or dies on turnaround speed. The IT work at SwervePoint included the same class of problems you're asking me to solve here — order-flow automation, warehouse integration, multi-document reconciliation, sales-enablement tooling.

SwervePoint's enterprise clients included Fidelity, Dell, HubSpot, and the NFL — I championed the integrations for those accounts as Director of IT. For BlackRock, I was the sole technical contact on the engagement.

The 3-layer orchestration discipline and the SOPs-as-deliverable approach both came out of operating inside a wholesale-distribution IT function — not out of a consulting practice. That matters for your engagement because the playbook I'll run at Top Notch is the one that worked on operations structurally like yours.

Three honest risks. None of them fatal.

1. Risk 01

   Tempo risk in the tapered phase.

   Months 3–6 drop to 2.5 days/week on-site. If a crisis surfaces, we're short a day.

   Mitigation: 25% rollover and 15% soft-overage absorb most of it. Option 3 eliminates this entirely by staying at 4 days/week.

2. Risk 02

   QuickBooks single-access risk.

   If other processes automate but QuickBooks remains sole-access with you, we've shifted the bottleneck rather than removing it.

   Mitigation: early Phase 1 conversation about read-only delegation to Lynn for non-sensitive exports. Not a forced change; a named conversation so the bottleneck doesn't hide.

3. Risk 03

   Change fatigue in long-tenured staff.

   Suzanne, Janine, and others have seen process changes come and go.

   Mitigation: middle-out rollout via Pete, small visible wins before system-wide changes, and framing every automation as role-solidification (“managing the SOP, not doing the job”). I take the change-management burden — you asked me to be the one carrying that and I'm carrying it.

One decision. One date. One call.

1. Decide which option fits by Friday, May 8.
2. Book the live walk-through — Tuesday May 5 at 10 AM or Thursday May 7 at 2 PM. 45 minutes, any questions, no obligation.
3. Kickoff date hold — I'm blocking the start date for whichever option you pick through Monday, May 11. After that the date floats.
4. If you want a second set of eyes first, share this link with whoever advises you — the full view has every number cited. No Top Notch-internal person is required to engage with it.

Once you pick an option, the following week is kickoff

• Week 1: on-site with Pete and Janine, 1:1 with you, baseline metric capture begins.
• Week 2: AP pilot with Lynn, Claude team accounts provisioned, first SOP draft.
• Week 4: Phase 1 readout.

What's not in this document — by design.

• Legal terms — they live in the SOW you sign after we align on an option.
• Tool-by-tool cost breakdown — handled inside the engagement; I don't mark up tool subscriptions.
• A 40-page SOW-as-proposal — short-by-choice. If you need more detail on any section, the Full view expands it and the live walk-through covers the rest.

Credibility references available on request

• The NECC Fall 2023 alumni feature (direct link).
• The March 2025 Adventures in Legal Tech podcast episode.
• A short list of production systems I can demonstrate live during the kickoff call — Emergency Restoration Inc's proposal generator, the IFT multi-agent system, and the 3-layer pattern running across the other four.
• Specific client references from my enterprise career available with reasonable notice, subject to those clients' own preferences.