We build the systems you keep meaning to hire a team for — and ship the first one in weeks.
Fractional AI operations and custom software for small and mid-sized businesses and organizations. We embed with your leadership team, find the admin bleed that's costing you deals, and ship the working system that stops it.
HOW WE WORK
Ignition. Ascent. Orbit.
Every engagement runs through three phases. We adapt the scope, not the process. You bring us one problem — we ship a working system. Then the next one. Over time, your operating layer stops being a patchwork of spreadsheets and becomes something your business actually runs on.
Ignition
A paid scoping sprint. We walk in, listen hard, and walk out with a working prototype on your real data. Not a slide deck. You’ll know exactly what we’re building, what it costs, and how long it takes before you commit to the rest.
Ascent
The build phase. Your system goes from prototype to production, running against real data, with your team starting to use it.
Orbit
Most consulting fails at the handoff. Orbit is designed around it. Your operators get trained, your documentation gets written, your system gets handed off — with a 30-day optimization window where we fix anything that breaks.
RECEIPTS, NOT ROADMAPS
Every engagement surfaces a system worth building. Sometimes it becomes a product.
When a system we build for one client generalizes — when the pattern is repeatable across a vertical — we productize it. These aren't hypothetical. They're systems running right now, born from actual engagements.
Every engagement might surface the next one. If you're running something we haven't built for yet, tell us — that's usually where the best products come from.
WHO THIS IS FOR
Small businesses and organizations that need real software — lean, hands-on, tired of tools that weren't built for them.
The shape that fits Liftoff: a lean organization — often 10–150 people — led by someone who still knows the work firsthand. Your team does real work in the field, the office, or both — and spends too much of their day feeding systems instead of doing what they're actually good at. You've tried software that promised to fix it. It didn't, because it was built for someone else's business.
If that's you, we should talk. The vertical doesn't matter as much as the shape — Liftoff works the same way for defense and GovCon firms, membership organizations and nonprofits, professional services shops, field-service and trade businesses, and anyone else with operators who shouldn't have to be data entry clerks.
WHO BUILDS THIS
Twenty years building this pattern inside bigger companies. Now I'm building it for smaller ones.
I spent twenty years running technology inside service firms — starting as Deputy CIO at AOL, then building delivery teams and shipping production systems at five more companies across very different industries. Same problem in every one: smart people buried under admin work that had nothing to do with why they were hired.
PropelAI is what happens when someone who's been in those rooms stops saying “we should automate that” and starts shipping it — for the businesses and organizations that actually run the economy.
If your data can't leave the building — defense contractors, healthcare groups with on-prem mandates, municipalities with compliance constraints — we also build air-gapped versions that run entirely on hardware in your facility. Same capability. Zero cloud.
Tell us what your team does. We'll tell you what we'd ship first.
Thirty-minute call. Bring the admin bleed you've lived with the longest. We'll sketch the system we'd build, the timeline, and the price. If it makes sense, we start. If it doesn't, you got thirty minutes of honest operator thinking for free.