Managed AI employees · Built in Nashville
Hire your first AI employee.
We build and manage AI teammates that take real work off your plate: inbox, follow-up, research, CRM, reporting, and recurring operations. Designed around your business. Managed in Nashville.
Not sure where to start? Take the 2-minute AI Employee Scorecard
- Live in about three weeks
- Approvals on anything that leaves the building
- You own the data and the access
The Wrangler
AI Chief of Staff
- Gmail6:12 AM
Triaged 63 overnight emails. 4 need you. 11 replies drafted for review.
- Calendar6:20 AM
Briefs ready for all 5 meetings today, with last-touch notes from the CRM.
- HubSpot6:31 AM
Logged yesterday's 3 calls. Moved the Coleman deal to Proposal.
- Follow-up6:38 AM
Drafted the follow-up to Dana at Rivergate. Waiting on your approval to send.
Approve and sendEdit - Slack6:40 AM
Board deck due Friday. Finance numbers still missing; nudged Priya.
Illustrative morning brief. Systems and approvals are configured per client.
The problem
You probably don't need another app.
You need less work.
Somewhere in your company, 10 to 30 hours a week of repetitive work happen across inboxes, calendars, CRMs, documents, and meetings. Nobody planned it. It accreted. And it lands on the people whose time is worth the most.
A normal week today
- Inbox is permanently behind, and the important thread is buried in it
- Meetings generate tasks that nobody tracks and nobody follows up on
- Inbound leads wait a day for a reply and go cold
- The CRM is half filled in, so nobody trusts the pipeline
- Research before an important call takes hours, so it gets skipped
- Recurring admin gets done by hand, late, by someone expensive
- Executives catch up on nights and weekends
The same week with an AI employee
- Inbox sorted before you sit down. Four things need you, and they are on top
- Every meeting produces tracked follow-ups, and someone chases them
- Every inbound lead gets a real reply within the hour
- CRM updated after every call, without anyone opening it
- A research brief lands before every important conversation
- Recurring reports and admin run on schedule without a person pushing
- You leave at six
AI can do most of this now. But a reliable AI employee is a different thing from a chat window. Integrations, permissions, judgment about what to escalate, and someone watching it every day are the hard part. That is the part we own.
Meet your first hire
The Wrangler. Your AI Chief of Staff.
The easiest, safest first hire. It sits between you and the inbox, the calendar, the CRM, and the dozen small loops that eat an executive's day. Treat this like a job description, because that is what it is.
The Wrangler
AI Chief of Staff · Reports to you
- Hours
- Every day
- Start
- About 3 weeks
- Managed by
- Us, in Nashville
What it owns
- Inbox triage and drafting
- Meeting preparation
- Meeting follow-up
- Calendar coordination
- Research and briefs
- Reminders and task tracking
- CRM updates
- Recurring reporting
- Routine communications
- Monitoring key relationships
What it connects to
- Gmail or Outlook
- Google or Microsoft calendar
- HubSpot, Salesforce, or Pipedrive
- Slack or Teams
- Drive, Notion, or SharePoint
- Your phone, by text or WhatsApp
Different stack? We integrate with what you already run.
What it does without asking
- Sorts and labels every email, and archives the noise
- Drafts replies to routine messages for your review
- Builds a one-page brief before every meeting
- Logs calls and meetings to the CRM the same day
- Tracks every commitment made in a meeting and chases it
- Assembles the weekly and monthly reports you already produce
- Flags customers, investors, or partners who have gone quiet
What still requires your approval
- !Anything sent to a client, prospect, or investor
- !Calendar changes involving someone outside the company
- !CRM changes to deal value or stage
- !Anything touching money, contracts, or people decisions
- !Any category of work it has not done before
You loosen these rules when you decide it has earned it. Not before.
A typical week
Mon
6:30 AM brief: what happened over the weekend, what is on today, three decisions only you can make.
Tue
Preps both investor calls with last-quarter numbers and open threads. Drafts follow-ups within the hour.
Wed
Notices a top-ten customer has not replied in three weeks. Drafts a check-in and asks you to approve it.
Thu
Chases the four open action items from Monday's leadership meeting. Two close, two escalate to you.
Fri
Sends the weekly pipeline and operations report. Flags what slipped and what is due next week.
Or start with a different job. See the rest of the ranch below.
Meet the ranch
Start with one. Add the next when the first proves itself.
Every role below is a job, not a feature. Each one is built around a specific outcome, connected to your real systems, and managed by us. Most clients start with The Wrangler and add a second within the year.
The Wrangler
AI Chief of Staff
Gives an executive back 8 to 12 hours a week.
- Inbox triage and drafting
- Meeting prep and follow-up
- Calendar coordination
- Reminders and task tracking
- CRM hygiene and reporting
The Closer
AI Sales and Business Development
No inbound lead waits more than an hour. No follow-up is forgotten.
- Inbound lead response and qualification
- Prospect research before outreach
- Follow-up sequences that actually follow up
- Proposal and quote drafts
- Pipeline updates after every touch
The Scout
AI Research and Intelligence
The brief is on your desk before you knew you needed it.
- Account and prospect dossiers
- Competitor and market monitoring
- Regulatory and industry scanning
- Pre-meeting research packets
- Weekly intelligence digest
The Ranch Hand
AI Operations and Administration
Recurring admin runs on schedule without a person pushing it.
- Onboarding and offboarding checklists
- Invoicing and collections reminders
- Vendor and document management
- Recurring reports and reconciliations
- Data entry across systems
The Host
AI Relationship Management and Customer Success
Every customer hears from you before they have a reason to leave.
- Scheduled check-ins and renewal outreach
- Ticket triage and escalation
- Account health monitoring
- Business review preparation
- Referral and review requests
Your next hire
A job we have not named yet
If you can describe the job to a capable new hire, we can probably build the AI employee that does it.
Nashville. In person.
We don't start with a demo. We start by sitting beside you.
Most AI companies are remote software vendors. They send a login and a help center. We come into your business, watch how the work actually gets done, find the work that should disappear, and build the AI employee to handle it.
We watch. We don't survey.
An intake form cannot see the four-tab workaround your office manager runs every morning. Two hours in the room can.
Built around your business, not a template.
Your systems, your policies, your tone, your escalation rules. The employee fits the company, not the other way around.
Local accountability.
You know where to find us. We are a drive away, not a ticket queue in another time zone.
A forward-deployed AI team for companies that cannot justify hiring their own AI engineers.
Ride-along notes
Example, not a clientOffice manager, Mon 8:10 AM
Re-keys every Stripe invoice into QuickBooks by hand.
2.5 hrs/wk
CEO, all day
Answers the same six pricing questions from sales in Slack.
4 hrs/wk
Sales rep, before each call
Researches every prospect from scratch in three browser tabs.
6 hrs/wk
Recommended first hire
The Ranch Hand, then The Closer
About 12.5 hours a week back inside the first month.
How it works
Four stages. One accountable team.
Deployment is controlled, staged, and boring on purpose. Nothing touches live systems until it has been tested on real work and you have approved the rules.
Ride Along
We sit with you and your team and watch how work actually happens. We map the workflows, count the hours, and pick the first job worth giving away.
- You
- Two to four hours of your time.
- Us
- Observation, a workflow map, and a first-hire recommendation with the hours attached.
Build
We design the AI employee around your systems: the integrations, the permissions, and the dedicated infrastructure it runs on.
- You
- Grant access. Answer a few questions.
- Us
- Architecture, integrations, credentials, and a secured environment.
Train
We teach it your workflows, preferences, policies, and escalation rules, then test it against real work before it touches anything live.
- You
- Review outputs. Approve the rules.
- Us
- Playbooks, test runs on real data, and launch.
Manage
We monitor every day, fix what drifts, tighten and expand permissions, and add the next workflow once the first one is boring.
- You
- Manage the outcome.
- Us
- Everything underneath it.
Typical first hire: live in about three weeks from the ride-along. Larger deployments are staged one employee at a time.
Economics
A $100K employee costs more than $100K. Your first AI employee doesn't.
The goal is not to use AI. The goal is to give you back ten hours a week and stop the next administrative hire.
Base cost
A $100K administrative hire
$100,000 salary
Your first AI employee
From $5,000 implementation
Fully loaded
A $100K administrative hire
Roughly $125,000 to $140,000 with taxes, benefits, and overhead
Your first AI employee
Implementation plus a monthly management fee sized to the work
Time to productive
A $100K administrative hire
6 to 12 weeks to hire, 3 months to ramp
Your first AI employee
About 3 weeks from ride-along to live
Hours
A $100K administrative hire
40 a week, with PTO and turnover
Your first AI employee
Every day, including the night before the board meeting
Adding a second
A $100K administrative hire
Repeat the whole process
Your first AI employee
Add a workflow to the ranch
Fully loaded cost uses the common planning estimate of 1.25 to 1.4 times base salary for taxes, benefits, and overhead.
What a first deployment is built to deliver
Illustrative targets, not customer results8 to 12
executive hours reclaimed per week
< 1 hr
response time on every inbound lead
95%+
CRM completeness, up from roughly half
100s
of recurring admin tasks handled per month
Run your own numbers
Pick the hours you would hand off and what that time is worth.
Time value reclaimed
$72,000 / year
$1,500 a week, over 48 working weeks.
Payback on a $5,000 first hire:
about 4 weeks
Simple arithmetic, not a promise. It leaves out the monthly management fee and the value of faster follow-up. The ride-along gives us the real number.
Proof
What clients say, and what a deployment actually looks like.
“We tried setting up OpenClaw ourselves for two weeks. Nashville Lobster Ranch had us running in three days.”
Sarah M.
COO, Nashville Healthcare Startup
“Having someone who actually understands executive workflows made all the difference. My agent handles 80% of my email now.”
James T.
Managing Partner, Private Equity
“The in-person setup was what sold us. They sat with our team, watched how we work, and built the agent around that.”
Rachel K.
VP of Operations, SaaS Company
Anatomy of a first hire
What we actually deploy, and what stays in your hands.
A representative Wrangler deployment. Details are generalized. Quantified case studies are published here as clients approve them.
- Company
- 40-person professional services firm
- First hire
- The Wrangler, for the managing partner
- Connected to
- Outlook, Microsoft 365 calendar, HubSpot, Teams
- Before
- 200+ emails a day. Two hours every night catching up. Follow-ups tracked in memory.
- After
- About 15 items a day need the partner. Every meeting has a brief. CRM updated the same day.
- Approvals kept
- All external email. All calendar changes. All deal-stage moves.
Security and control
Your AI employee doesn't get the keys to the building.
It gets a badge for the rooms its job requires, and every door it opens is logged. Control expands only as trust is earned, and you can pull the badge at any time.
Least-privilege access
It gets the exact permissions its job needs and nothing more. Read before write. Draft before send.
Human approvals
Anything consequential starts as an approval. Automation expands only when you decide it has earned it.
Secure credential handling
Credentials live in a vault, scoped per system, never in a prompt, never shared across clients.
Full audit trail
Every action is logged with what it did, when, and why. You can review any day in detail.
Dedicated infrastructure
Your AI employee runs in its own isolated environment. No shared tenancy with other clients.
Continuous monitoring
We watch for errors, drift, and unusual behavior every day, and we fix it before you notice.
Your data stays yours
You own the accounts, the data, and the outputs. Nothing is used to train models.
Revoke in minutes
Turn off any integration, or the whole employee, whenever you want. No lock-in.
Want the technical version? It is in the FAQ and in our security guide for business leaders.
Engagement
An engagement, not a subscription.
We scope every engagement in person. No seat licenses, no rate card, no surprise invoices. You pay to get a job done and to keep it done.
Ranch Assessment
Start here
We identify your best first deployment.
- In-person ride-along with you and your team
- Workflow map with hours attached
- First-hire recommendation and scope
- Credited toward your First Hire
First Hire
From $5,000
One AI employee, built, tested, and launched.
- Initial workflows designed around your business
- Integrations with the systems the job touches
- Permissions, approvals, and secure infrastructure
- Training, testing on real work, and launch
Managed Ranch
Monthly
Ongoing management, so it keeps working.
- Daily monitoring and issue resolution
- Optimization as your business changes
- Security updates and access reviews
- New workflows added over time
Team Deployment
Custom
Multiple AI employees across the business.
- Sales, operations, admin, and customer success
- Shared context across your AI workforce
- Executive reporting on what the ranch produces
- A named operator who knows your business
Start here
What's the first job you'd give away?
Tell us what eats your time. We'll tell you whether an AI employee can realistically own it, and what it would take.
- Reply within one business day
- If an AI employee is the wrong answer, we say so
- No pitch deck. A conversation about the work.
Not sure which job to hand over? Take the 2-minute scorecard.
Prefer email? sebastian@nashvillelobsterranch.com
Questions
Straight answers.
The things business owners ask us before they hire their first AI employee.