Headcount Zero

Jordan lost an $8,000 project because his phone went to voicemail while he was in deep work. By December, he had built a Twilio voice AI agent that picks up every call, qualifies leads with natural conversation, and books consultations directly into Calendly. No receptionist, no VA—just a Node server, OpenAI's Realtime API, and about six hours of build time. This episode walks through the complete...

Every month you run AI for clients on a flat retainer, you're subsidizing their usage with your margin. The gap between what the models cost and what you charge only widens as clients adopt the tools you built for them — success makes the problem worse. This episode shows you how to fix that with Stripe usage-based billing: meters, pricing plans, rate cards, and two concrete implementation paths s...

Solo automation consultants face a dangerous liability: storing client passwords in Slack DMs, Google Docs, and email threads. One breach exposes every credential you've ever handled. Make's Credential Requests feature eliminates this risk entirely by letting clients authorize their own apps through secure OAuth links. Jordan walks through building a complete 4-scenario system: automated request c...

Turn invisible automation work into undeniable ROI with a live client dashboard that updates itself. This episode walks through building a complete Stripe-to-Looker Studio pipeline that shows real money — MRR, time savings converted to dollars, and operations eliminated with price tags attached. Your clients will check it voluntarily, without you asking, because it shows them exactly why they're p...

Solo operators lose thousands in recoverable revenue to failed payments they never chase. This episode shows you how to build a zero-touch dunning system using Stripe Smart Retries plus Make/Zapier webhooks that automatically recovers failed payments while you focus on delivery. Jordan walks through the exact Dashboard configuration (8 attempts over 2 weeks), webhook orchestration for customer ema...

Turn signed contracts into fully provisioned client workspaces in under an hour—completely automated. Jordan walks through the exact chain from PandaDoc webhook to Stripe payment processing to Notion workspace creation to Google Drive folder setup to welcome email delivery. You'll get the complete Make scenario with idempotency checks, error handlers, and rollback logic so nothing gets created twi...

Solo operators lose thousands to scope creep through informal client requests. Jordan shows you how to build a complete automation that catches every "quick favor," classifies it as in or out of scope, generates a priced change order, and blocks work until both signature and payment clear. Using Slack for approvals, Notion for data, PandaDoc for documents, and Stripe for payment gates, this system...

Jordan tracked 83 discovery calls over six months—47 were complete wastes of time. Budget mismatches, timeline disconnects, people wanting services he doesn't even offer. That's 35 hours of billable time lost to tire-kickers while qualified leads waited. So he built an AI-powered intake system that qualifies leads before they ever see his calendar. Qualified leads get instant booking links with pr...

Your best automation work is invisible—and that's killing your client relationships. When automations run perfectly in the background, clients forget they exist and start questioning what they're paying for. This episode shows you how to build a zero-touch weekly digest that makes your invisible work visible, using Gmail, Make.com, and Notion to automatically compile everything you shipped into a...