Bob is an AI operations layer that handles the daily work most small businesses lose evenings to — the books, the inbox, the schedule, the reporting. It runs on a small computer that sits in your shop — your box, your data, your call.
![The small Dell computer that runs Bo[a]B on your premises](/assets/hero-boab.png)
Each function learns your patterns and reports in plain English. You stay the decision-maker. Bob handles the part where the decision gets executed and the records get kept straight.
Keeps the books current and tells you what changed.
Reconciles your accounts every morning and drafts the monthly close. Tells you the three numbers that moved most week-over-week — and flags the cash-flow dip three weeks before it happens.
Tracks every lead and follows up so none of them rot.
Catches every inbound — form fills, walk-ins, referrals — and puts them in one place. Drafts the follow-up in your voice and flags the leads gone quiet. Turns a shoebox of business cards into a working pipeline.
Writes, schedules, and reports on what's working.
Drafts the posts, the newsletter, the seasonal promo — in your voice, not generic AI sludge. Schedules across channels and reports back in plain English on what worked and what didn't.
Answers the easy ones, routes the hard ones to you.
Watches the inbox, the chat, the voicemail. Answers the questions you've answered a thousand times — hours, location, walk-ins — and routes the ones that need you, context attached, so you respond fast.
Watches the numbers and flags what's moving.
Reads your finances, sales, marketing, and operations together and tells you weekly what changed. Surfaces the patterns you'd miss — the regular who's vanished, the item with quietly collapsing margins. The thing your CFO would tell you if you had one.
Keeps the tools talking to each other and alerts you when one stops.
Your POS talks to your accounting; your invoices land in your books without anyone copying numbers. When something breaks — and it always does — you get a clear alert and a fix path, not 3am detective work.
An honest conversation about what your operating week actually looks like. Where the hours go. What data lives where. Which three time-sinks would change everything if they disappeared. I leave with the picture; you leave with a clear scope and a fixed price.
I set up Bo[a]B against your data, in your voice, on your hardware. Each of the six functions gets tuned to what your business actually needs — a coffee shop's Bob doesn't look like a law firm's. You're available for a couple of working sessions while we get it right.
The machine — a small computer about the size of a hardback book — gets delivered and installed where it lives. We turn it on together. We watch it work. I walk you through what you can ask Bob to do, and what you should never ask him to do.
You're the operator from day one — Bob reports to you, not to me. I'm in the background keeping the system healthy, fixing what breaks, and pushing out improvements as I learn from other customers. Weekly check-ins for the first month, then monthly once it's humming. The line stays open.
Most AI services run in the cloud, on hardware you don't own, with your data flowing through systems you don't control. That model works for some businesses. It doesn't work for the businesses I build for — the ones whose customer list, books, supplier relationships, and competitive edge live in the data Bob touches.
Bo[a]B runs on a small computer that sits in your shop. Your customer records, your books, your patterns, your way of doing business are processed right there, on hardware you can put your hand on. The guiding rule is simple: your data stays under your control — what, if anything, ever leaves the box is your decision.
Three practical consequences: your data isn't used to train anyone else's model; the everyday work keeps running on the box even if your internet drops; and if you ever decide to stop working with me, you keep the box and the data with it. Walking away is a clean break, not a forensics project.
pi.0 is a studio of one. I do the work, end to end — discovery, build, install, the running of it. I don't subcontract. Twenty years before this, I ran operations inside companies that had real ops teams — Google, NYT, MoMA, a turnaround at Sonicbids. Bo[a]B is the layer those companies have, sized for the businesses I grew up around.
Owner-operators running roughly $500K–$3M in annual revenue, with three to twenty-five people on the team — coffee shops, restaurants, retail, professional services. The kind of business where you still know every customer's name and you're also the one fixing the printer at 11pm. It's not built for businesses big enough to afford a real ops team, for one-person shops a spreadsheet still covers, or for owners who want a fully autonomous agent they don't supervise. Bob takes work off your plate; he doesn't take you out of the loop.
Founding customers: a one-time setup between $5K and $7.5K, then $1K–$1.5K per month managed. Standard pricing kicks in when the founding cohort closes — setup around $15K, managed around $2K per month. Hardware is included in the monthly. No multi-year lock-in.
You do. Always. Your data lives on your hardware, in your shop, and ownership never transfers to me. It's processed on the box, and you control what — if anything — ever leaves it. I never sell your data, and I never use it to train a model for anyone else.
You keep the machine. You keep the data. We schedule one final session where I show you what's still running, what you can keep using as-is, and what you'd want to swap out if you decide to maintain it long-term yourself. No exit fees. No lock-in.
The box is a commodity computer. If something fails, a replacement gets shipped overnight under warranty. I keep an encrypted backup of your configuration that restores in a couple of hours. You'd lose maybe a half-day of automated work — your business keeps running because the humans still know how to do their jobs.
Every action Bob takes is logged in plain English. You can read what he did this morning, last week, last month. Anything Bob writes — emails, posts, reports — passes through your approval before it goes out, unless you explicitly tell him to ship it without checking.
No. Bob does the work nobody on your team wants to do — the reconciliation, the follow-up nobody got to, the report that should have been written but wasn't. Your team stays on the work they're good at, the work customers actually pay you for.
Read access to the data you choose: email, POS, accounting software, calendar, payroll. Write access only where you explicitly grant it — sending follow-up emails, posting to social, drafting your weekly report. Anything that moves money or commits the business needs your approval every time.
About four to six weeks from the first conversation to the day you stop having to think about it. Discovery is one week. Build is two to three. Install is a day. Then a couple of weeks of tuning while you and Bob get used to each other.
Tell me. If it fits within Bob's shape — automating a piece of operating work — it gets built. Improvements land for everyone, not just you, with your data staying yours. If what you want is bigger than that — a custom product, a one-off integration — we scope it separately.
The monthly covers the machine, the system updates, the new actions other customers' setups have unlocked, and direct access to me when something needs attention. It's a managed-service relationship, not a software lease. You're paying for the running, not the having.
Two reasons. First, it stands for Business on a Box — the literal thing it is, a small computer running your business in the background. Second, it sounds like Bob, a nod to Bob from Office Space — the efficiency consultant who told the truth and cut the bullshit. The Office Space Bob fired people. This Bob does the opposite: he handles the work your team doesn't want to do, so you can keep them on what they're good at.
Three founding customer spots for 2026. If you've read this far and any of it sounded like your business, talk to me. Twenty minutes, no slides, no pitch — just a conversation about whether Bo[a]B fits your shape.