Punch above your weight
Small team.
Serious systems.
Shipped in weeks.
We design and build the digital products and AI systems you keep meaning to hire a team for. Custom software, in production, in weeks — we find the work that's costing you deals and ship the system that handles it.
Five systems shipped out of client work · three available today · fixed price, never hourly · air-gapped builds for data that can't leave the building
[ 01 ]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 the 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.
[ 02 ]Receipts, not roadmaps
Every engagement surfaces a system worth building.
When a system we build for one client generalizes — when the pattern repeats across a vertical — we productize it. These aren't hypothetical. They're running right now, and every one of them started as somebody's actual problem.
If you're running something we haven't built for yet, tell us — that's usually where the best ones come from.
[ 03 ]What's actually true
Counts of what exists, not a pipeline dressed up as traction.
- systems productized out of real client engagements
- 5systems productized out of real client engagements
- available today — Frame, Brief, and Emblem
- 3available today — Frame, Brief, and Emblem
- years running technology inside service firms
- 20years running technology inside service firms
- hours billed hourly — every engagement is fixed price
- 0hours billed hourly — every engagement is fixed price
These are counts of shipped systems and years worked — not revenue, not a customer count, and not a roadmap read as if it were finished.
[ 04 ]Who this is for
Lean, hands-on, and tired of tools built for someone else.
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 the 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.
The vertical matters less than the shape. Liftoff works the same way for 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.
[ 05 ]Who builds this
Twenty years building this pattern inside bigger companies.
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.
If your data can't leave the building — healthcare groups with on-prem mandates, municipalities with compliance constraints — we 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 minutes. 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.