Most owners have been offered pieces of this before: a tool to figure out alone, a strategy to implement themselves, a build with nobody maintaining it. We don't sell pieces. Every SageKeeper engagement carries all four jobs, every month, under one retainer that costs less than one full-time technical hire.
We sit with your leadership, map the workflows that eat the most hours, and put the build order in writing. You get a plan a foreman could read, reviewed with you every month. No tool-of-the-month, no chasing whatever was in the news this week.
Working systems inside the software you already run: your email, your spreadsheets, your job system, your practice management. Your people review what the system produces before it goes anywhere that matters. The build is the deliverable, not a recommendation about one.
Every build comes with training for the people who touch it, until they run it without calling us. Adoption is a contracted deliverable. If your team isn't using the system, that's our problem to fix, not yours to apologize for.
Monitoring, fixes, retraining, and monthly tuning are in the base retainer. When something we built breaks, we fix it and there is no separate invoice. We built it, we fix it. That's what “keeper” means.
Hiring this capability in-house means a technical leader, developers, and a trainer. Our retainer costs less than one full-time technical hire, and it covers all four jobs.
One working session. We review last month's numbers against the plan and set this month's priority. You always know what's being built and why.
We go where the work happens and learn the workflow from the people who do it. The next build gets scoped from the inside, not from a template.
The system ships into the tools your team already uses, with your people reviewing outputs and a full record of what it did and when.
Your team is trained on what was built. You get a written report on what ran, what it saved, and what's next. Short enough to actually read.
We start narrow: one department, one workflow that matters weekly. We measure how it runs today before we touch anything, then build. By day 30 there is a working system in daily use.
The build gets connected to your documents and records, access rules go in, and the people who use it are trained until it's routine. Rough edges surface here and get fixed here.
You see what the first build actually changed, in writing, against the baseline we measured at the start. The second workflow is scoped and the rhythm is set.
There are firms in this market that charge more than our entire retainer for strategy alone, with development and training sold separately or not at all. There are project shops that build well, ship, and leave. Neither model was built for a business with no one technical on staff. Here is the honest comparison, feature by feature.
| What you get | Strategy-only firm | Project build shop | SageKeeper |
|---|---|---|---|
| Senior direction on what to build | Yes | Rarely | Yes |
| Working systems, built and shipped | No | Yes | Yes |
| Your staff trained on every build | No | Sometimes | Yes |
| Maintenance after go-live | No | Billed separately | In the retainer |
| Built for businesses with no tech team | No | No | Yes |
| Billing in arrears, month-one walk-away | No | No | Yes |
We hear a version of this often: fifty pages, a list of vendors to go hire, and operations unchanged. That engagement ended where ours begins. Month one of a SageKeeper engagement produces a working system in daily use, not a document about one. If a month ever went by where all we produced was analysis and slides, we would not consider that month delivered.
A monthly retainer that costs less than one full-time technical hire. After the 30-minute call you get pricing in writing within two business days: the numbers, what a month includes, and the hire it compares against, so you can read it without anyone on the phone. Most clients start with a single workflow.
That is exactly who this is built for. You don't need anyone to evaluate architecture or manage a vendor. We run the technical side, your people run the business, and the systems are built so your team operates them day to day without us on the phone.
You do. The systems run in accounts you own, on mainstream platforms, and the documentation is written for your team. If we parted ways tomorrow, everything keeps working and everything stays with you. Our retention plan is the quality of the work, not the difficulty of leaving.
Your data stays yours. Access rules and a full record of what each system did are configured before anything goes live, and the data-handling terms are written into the proposal in plain language, specific to the systems you run.
You're invoiced at the end of each month worked, never in advance. End the engagement at the end of month one and that invoice is waived: you owe nothing. After that, engagements can be paused or ended without long lock-ins or exit penalties.
Whatever fits your business, with a strong preference for the software you already run and for systems your own team can operate after training. We are not tied to any vendor, and we don't dress up a plain automation in AI vocabulary to make it sound bigger than it is.
We invoice after the work, not before. Your first month proves us, or it frees you.