Workforce-first AI consulting/Franklin, Tennessee

Yourteamgetsitshoursback.Withoutlayoffs.

Most firms are stuck somewhere between a free ChatGPT account and a stalled pilot. Harpeth Labs maps where your people lose hours every week, builds the two or three workflows that give those hours back, and stays until adoption sticks. Fixed price. A plan, not a pitch.

Book a 30-minute discovery call

Take the 5-minute readiness quiz

$2,500 fixed-price audit

10-page roadmap in two weeks

Zero layoffs in any recommendation

Refund the second half if it has no actionable value

Manufacturers

Distributors

Job shops

Engineering & architecture firms

Marketing agencies

Consultancies

Contractors & trades

Dental practices

Physician groups

Physical therapy

Williamson County

Davidson County

Rutherford County

Maury County

Sumner County

Wilson County

Manufacturers

Distributors

Job shops

Engineering & architecture firms

Marketing agencies

Consultancies

Contractors & trades

Dental practices

Physician groups

Physical therapy

Williamson County

Davidson County

Rutherford County

Maury County

Sumner County

Wilson County

The problem we fix

Most AI projects don't fail.
They quietly stall.

A widely cited MIT study put the failure rate of enterprise GenAI pilots at 95 percent. The number is provocative. The pattern behind it is not. Walk into any business that shelved an AI initiative in the last eighteen months and you'll find the same five tells.

of GenAI pilots produce no measurable return

of AI projects are abandoned, usually because the business wasn't ready

wage premium for workers with real AI skills

The tool was chosen before the job was mapped.

Someone fell in love with a vendor demo, then went looking for a problem it could solve. Starting from a specific workflow feels slow, which is why most teams skip it.

There was no baseline.

Nobody measured how long the work used to take or what it cost to do once. You can't prove ROI against a number that was never recorded.

Training was a launch event, not a practice.

A 45-minute webinar and a recording in a shared drive. Three weeks later, half the team has forgotten the prompts that worked.

The sponsor never used the tool themselves.

If the owner who approved the spend can't show you the last three things they did with it, nobody below them is using it either.

No owner inside the line of business.

A vendor PM and an IT contact aren't owners. An owner is the person whose day gets easier or harder based on whether this thing works.

The fix is not another tool. It's going back to the workflow layer that got skipped on the way in. That's the work we do.

Who we serve

Built for the firms where staff time is the product.

Owner-led Middle Tennessee companies of 20 to 150 people that sell, make, deliver, or care for a living, and whose office teams are drowning in quotes, proposals, follow-ups, and reports. Pick your world.

Manufacturers, distributors & job shops

Get your quoting desk and your floor leads their day back.

The I-24 and I-65 corridors are full of 20 to 150 person shops where the same three people quote every job, chase every order, and pull every report by hand. We start with the office side of the plant, quoting, order entry, customer updates, and production reporting, and leave the floor alone until you are ready. Every workflow stays reviewable by the person who owns it today.

Quotes and estimates rebuilt from scratch for similar jobs

Order entry and spec details rekeyed between email, ERP, and spreadsheets

Customer status updates and supplier follow-ups that eat the afternoon

Production and OTD reports compiled by hand every week

Quote & estimate first drafts6.5 hrs / wk

Order entry & spec capture5.0 hrs / wk

Customer & supplier status updates4.2 hrs / wk

Weekly production & OTD reporting3.3 hrs / wk

Illustrative hours per office role, drawn from typical audit findings. Yours will be measured on your own quotes and orders, not guessed.

Also a strong fit: accounting firms, wealth-management offices, insurance agencies, and any owner-led company with heavy document and follow-up work. Under 12 people or over 300? Start with the readiness quiz and we'll point you the right way.

Engagements

One front door. Three ways forward.

Every engagement starts with the audit. Many clients take the roadmap and run it themselves. The paths exist because clients keep asking, "what if we want you to keep going with us?"

Step 1 / The front door

$2,500 fixed

Workforce-First AI Audit

A two-week diagnostic of where AI can give your team hours back. Kickoff workshop, five stakeholder interviews, then a 10-page roadmap your leadership can read in 30 minutes and act on Monday morning.

Three priority workflows, each with hours saved and tools to use

Inventory of AI features you already pay for in Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, and your stack

90-day quick wins with zero new spend

60-minute leadership readout plus 30 days of email follow-up

If the roadmap has no actionable value, the second half is waived.

Start with the audit

Path A / Build it with you

$10K to $40K fixed scope

Implementation Project

We pick up one to three priority workflows from the roadmap and build them with your team over four to twelve weeks. Reviewable, documented, and trained into the people who run them, so they keep working after we leave.

Best for firms that want results without building an internal AI capability

Quote-to-order, proposal, and reporting workflows rebuilt around the people who run them

Multi-site and multi-crew companies: implement once, repeat per location

Path B / Stay in the room

$2K to $5K per month

Fractional AI Advisor

We join your leadership team as a part-time AI lead. Weekly meetings, unlimited email access, and a trusted outside voice as you roll out across departments, shifts, or locations. Six-month minimum, month to month after.

Best for firms building internal capability over 12 to 24 months

Guardrails and policies kept current as tools change

A standing answer to "what's our AI strategy?"

Why workforce-first

Most AI consulting starts with the question, "what can we automate?" That is the wrong question. It pushes you toward replacing people, and it pushes your team toward quiet resistance. The workforce-first question is different: where is your best employee stuck doing twenty-dollar-an-hour work? Start there, and AI becomes leverage for the team you already have. Your estimator takes back six hours a week. Your project managers write proposals three times faster. Your front desk stops drowning in reschedules. Headcount stays the same. Revenue per head goes up. That is the only kind of recommendation that makes it into a Harpeth Labs roadmap.

No layoffs in any recommendation. Written into every engagement letter.

The process

Two weeks. Three milestones. No surprises.

About 8 to 10 hours of your team's time in total, scheduled around your calendar. Delivered by the founder, not a junior consultant.

Day 190 min

Kickoff workshop

We meet your leadership team, align on goals, walk through the workforce-first framework, identify the five stakeholders we'll interview, and lock the schedule.

Days 2 to 55 x 60 min

Stakeholder interviews

One with the owner or managing partner, one with the operating or finance lead, and three with frontline staff across functions. The goal is to hear where time is actually leaking, not where you think it is.

Week 260 min readout

Roadmap and readout

We synthesize, build the 10-page Workforce-First AI Roadmap, and walk your leadership through it live. The document is yours to keep, share, and act on.

Hours-back calculator

What is repetitive work costing your firm?

Rough math, on purpose. The audit replaces these guesses with measured numbers from your own team.

People doing repeatable quoting, proposal, reporting, or follow-up work25Hours per person, per week, on that work8Fully loaded cost per hour$45Share we typically give back with two or three workflows35%

Hours back per year

3,360

Value of that time

$151,200

Equivalent full-time capacity

1.8 FTE

Capacity you keep on the team, not headcount you cut. Against a $2,500 audit, that is the whole argument.

Measure it for real

Led by

John Daniels

Fifteen years selling and building go-to-market for infrastructure, developer tools, and AI companies. Now focused on one thing: helping Middle Tennessee firms put AI to work without the hype. The audit is delivered by John, not a contractor.

john@harpethlabs.com LinkedIn

Practitioner, not pundit

We build, train, and ship. Not 80-page slide decks that gather dust.

Workforce-first

AI value lives in how people use it daily. We specialize in the human layer.

Local, then regional

Franklin and Nashville roots. We meet in person, on your floor. Travel included within 60 miles.

SMB-priced, mid-market quality

Accessible to a 20-person shop. Rigorous enough for a 150-person company.

Calm in a hyped market.

Free / 5 minutes

Not sure you're ready? Find out.

The Workforce-First AI Readiness Assessment is a short self-assessment that scores where your firm sits, from "Getting Started" to "Building Momentum," and sends a two-page report with your next three moves. No call required.

Take the readiness assessment

Questions

Straight answers.

Anything missing? Email john@harpethlabs.com.

Start from a workflow, not a tool. Pick the two or three tasks your team repeats most (quoting, proposals, follow-up, reporting), measure how long they take today, then apply AI with a human review step. The Workforce-First AI Audit does exactly this in two weeks for a fixed $2,500.

Ready when you are

A plan, not a pitch.

Thirty minutes about your team, the workflows stretching them thin, and whether the audit is the right next step. If it isn't, we'll say so.