AI Product Studio for Messy Jobs
AI lives on screens. The businesses we work with do not.
We turn hard-won intuition into an asset: repeatable, improvable, and less dependent on a few people. Built for operators with crews, schedules, inventory and walk-in customers.
For owners, and the funds that back them.
Trusted by industry leaders.
What we do
We're an AI product studio for messy jobs.
We do two things : Teach and Build
Learn from us
01 · Executive
Executive Training
AI means nothing if you don't start somewhere.
- Hands-on sessions where you and your partners identify what's possible and make progress towards those goals.
- Find the 3-5 problems worth solving this quarter, and the number each one has to move.
- Leave with a plan your team can run: the first small test, who owns it, and what "it worked" looks like.
For owners and partners stuck on what to do about AI (and keep putting it off).
See training →
02 · Team
Team Training
Take one team from curious to building.
- Pick one team: dispatch, the office, estimating, ops, sales.
- Training on the tools and workflows that team runs every day, inside the systems you already pay for.
- Sessions run on their real work: your files, your inbox, your job notes. Nobody translates a demo back to their desk.
- Prompts, templates and checklists each role keeps and reuses.
- A week of office hours after, so what they built keeps running once we're gone.
Let us build for you
03 · Embedded
AI Operations Partner
An operations partner and a build team, embedded to get you moving.
- An ops and engineering partner embedded in your business, finding and building on workflows that cost you the most.
- Weekly working sessions with your crew. Our build team handles the builds.
- A monthly leadership review to check progress and choose what gets built next.
- First build live in 2 weeks.
04 · Scoped
Custom Builds
One workflow at a time, on the stack you already run.
- Fix one thing: the job that eats the week. Intake, scheduling, dispatch, invoicing, the Monday report.
- Or build the operating system: your tools connected, on one screen your team runs the day from.
- We map it with your team, build it, and stay until it runs without us. You own it.
- Most complex builds go live in 3-6 weeks.
Industries
Who we've built for.
Crews, kitchens, shops and job sites.
The newsletter · Weekly · Free
AI for Messy Jobs
Weekly field notes from inside $3M+ businesses with complex operations, messy physical realities, and the operators trying to modernize it all. Fast.
What we've built
Tools your crews will actually use.
Jefe. The scheduling board, auto-assigning a crew to its next phase and sending the text. Built for a 50-person drywall crew. 700+ hours of work cut so far this year.
• Hollister residence, septic pumpout plus riser install, $1,850. Homeowner's court, quoted 11/3, 7 days since touch.
• Cedar Lane HOA, fall cleanup and irrigation blowout, 14 lots, $6,400. Board votes Thu 11/12, they asked for the lot map.
• Miller farm, 1,500-gallon tank cleanout, Thu 7:00 am, crew 2. Inspector meets us on site at 1:30.
• Hollister (Dan Hollister): quote is 7 days old, call or text with two dates.
• Cedar Lane (Pat Reyes): send the lot map before Thursday's board meeting.
• Route 9 Diner: grease trap due, last service 92 days ago, book it.
7:00 Crew 1, Birch St. leaf removal · 7:00 Crew 2, Miller farm · 9:30 Crew 3, two pumpouts in Fernley
Why this works
Hi, I'm Cris, Founder of MSO. I know what it costs to hold a business together with grit.
I've watched it happen at every level — scrappy startups, $500M operations, Main Street businesses doing $5M on a good year. The constraint looks different each time. The exhaustion doesn't.
15+ years building at Uber, Instacart, and IDEO taught me where systems break under pressure. It also taught me something nobody in the AI space wants to admit: most of it creates more work than it solves.
I've been building with AI since before it was a course topic. I know where it earns its place inside a real operation, and where it's just noise dressed up as a demo.
That distinction matters.
More about MSO →Our approach · The Operator Triangle
Your business runs on three forces. Most operators have never seen them clearly.
Every owner-operator juggles three realities at once — what your customers expect, what your team and systems can reliably deliver, and what works financially without burning you out. When these three align, the business scales without breaking. When they don't, you get firefighting, margin leaks, and exhaustion.
Most operators feel all of this but can't name it. That's where we start: making the invisible visible, so you know exactly where the real problem lives and what to fix first.
We use the Operator Triangle to get clear on what will make the business more money. That answer decides what we build, and in what order.
Inaction has a price tag.
Two more years of this isn't neutral.
The operator that doesn't figure out where systems and AI fit doesn't just stay stuck. They watch margins compress, lose good people to competitors who have figured it out, and make the same expensive mistakes with less runway to recover.
The problems don't go away. It just gets more expensive.
Profit should fuel the life you want — not consume it.
Clients
What our clients say about working with us.
"While working with MSO, we saw our event revenue increase by 96% and regular customer attendance jump 31%. But the personal shifts matter just as much—I'm paying attention to the data now and using it to create more business."
Linda, boutique retail"Cris has the right tools, knowledge, and team to take a business to the next level of success."
John, trades org"Cris is the best. Her experience and intelligence are evident in everything she does. She is also ridiculously hard working and professional and will over-deliver on her promises."
Matt, gym"Cris and her team have helped us leverage new A.I. tools to our advantage. We have turned a stagnant data source into something usable and valuable. This is critically important for our business."
Rachael, real estate"Cris has this ability to hear the important nugget buried in my many questions and wild ideas, then distill it into something actionable. With grace and humor."
Jack, commercial contractorThree operators. Three problems. Here's what changed.
Read the case studies →AI isn't magic.
The operators who win with it aren't the ones who adopted it fastest. They're the ones who knew where to put it.
We help you figure out where.
