Is AI Worth It for Your Business? (Usually, No.) Give me 30 minutes, I'll give it to you straight.

Everybody's selling you AI right now. Most of it won't pay for itself.

I'm Mike Thomson, a business operations consultant here in the Hill Country. I build AI systems for a living, and the honest answer for most businesses I talk to is "not yet," or "not this," or "something simpler would do it for a tenth of the cost."

So here's my offer. Give me 30 minutes, free. Pick the part of your business that eats the most time - the report somebody rebuilds every Monday, invoices chased by text, follow-up that only happens when somebody remembers - and walk me through it.

I'll tell you three things:

• Which step is actually costing you, often it's not the one that annoys you most
• Whether AI is the right tool, a simpler automation, or nothing at all
• Roughly what a fix would cost and what it would save

Written down and sent to you afterward.

What you won't get is a pitch. If the answer is "leave it alone," that's the answer. I'll say AI is the wrong tool even when building it would pay me more, because the alternative is selling somebody a system they'll stop using.

When it is worth it, this is what that looks like: a Facebook glitch burned $60,000 of a client's ad budget, so I built them a system that watches spend in real time and shuts it off automatically. The next glitch stopped at about $4,300.

25+ years in online advertising, business development, marketing, and analytics. My longest client and I have been working together since 2006, across more than one business he started. The current one does about $10 million a year, and we built it from concept.

Open to any Kerrville-area business. Realtors, attorneys, ranchers, insurance agents, manufacturers, shops, wineries. If you still know most of your customers by name, we'll get along.

Book it: https://freshstarts.io or call (830) 988-6988.