AI advisory · Manhattan / Remote

AI that earns its place in your P&L.

Operators & Co. is a boutique AI advisory and implementation firm for small and mid-sized businesses. We audit, automate, and build — and we leave the slideware at the door.

Start an application Six to eight questions · ten minutes · we reply within a week

No buzzwords.
No PowerPoints.
Just throughput.

We don't sell transformation. We don't sell frameworks. We sit inside your operation and scale your biggest bottleneck — the one costing you sleep, staff, or margin.

That usually means shipping working systems in weeks, not decks in quarters. Your ops manager knows where the pain is. We know how to build the thing that removes it.

If a slide would do, hire someone else.

i.

Audit &
roadmap

Two weeks inside your operation. We map workflows, interview your team, and leave with a prioritized list of what to automate, what to replace, and what to leave alone. One document. No PowerPoints.

Ops reviewStack analysisROI model
ii.

Implementation

We don't hand you a deck and a bill. We sit with your team, wire up the agents, migrate the data, and shut down the SaaS you no longer need. You get working systems — and a team that knows how to run them.

Agent pipelinesSaaS consolidationEnablement
iii.

Build

The tool your ops manager rigged together in Airtable? It's probably a product. We productize internal systems into revenue — new SKUs, new lines of business, sometimes new companies altogether.

Internal → externalProduct strategyEquity-share

Four phases.
No retainers.
No theater.

Every engagement is fixed-scope and fixed-fee. If a phase doesn't earn its keep, we stop. We'd rather lose a month than waste a year.

01
Discovery
A 45-minute call, then a week on-site or on-Zoom shadowing your operators. We want to watch the work, not read a brief about it.
Week 1
02
Diagnosis
A written report — 8 to 12 pages — naming the three to five interventions we'd make, the order to make them in, and the dollars each one should return in year one.
Weeks 2–3
03
Build
We ship. Agents, integrations, dashboards, playbooks — whatever the diagnosis called for. Your team pairs with ours so nothing is a black box the day we leave.
Weeks 4–12
04
Handoff
Documentation, internal training, and a 90-day check-in. We stay on call, not on payroll.
Week 13+
Midwestern 3PL Logistics · 140 staff
$42M revenue
Engagement: Q2 ’25

Replaced a seven-seat TMS with a dispatch agent and a spreadsheet.

Load planning was eating two FTEs a day. We built a GPT-powered dispatcher that reads broker emails, scores loads against their rate matrix, and drafts responses in the ops manager's voice. The TMS got cancelled ninety days in.

38h / week returned to operations
Regional dental group Healthcare · 22 locations
$68M revenue
Engagement: Q4 ’25

Turned a no-show problem into a recall engine.

Front-desk churn was gutting their follow-up. We deployed a voice agent that handles recall outreach, insurance pre-verification, and rescheduling — in English and Spanish, during hours no human wanted to work.

$1.4M / recovered annual revenue
Specialty contractor Construction · commercial
$17M revenue
Engagement: Q1 ’26

Spun an internal estimator into a product the competition licenses.

Their lead estimator had built a bid tool in Excel that nobody else in the trade had. We rebuilt it, productized it, and helped them launch it as a subscription. It now generates more margin than two of their job sites.

11× / gross margin vs. services line
Full case studies available under NDA · ask during discovery
Portrait · to be added

Maren Halloway

Founder · ex-Stripe, ex-Flexport

I started Operators & Co. because the advice gap was obvious. I spent eight years at Stripe and Flexport building the internal tools that made those companies run — risk models, ops dashboards, the agent pipelines nobody talks about at conferences.

When I left, the calls I kept getting weren't from venture-backed startups. They were from a friend who owns a dental group. A cousin running a specialty distributor. A neighbor with 80 trucks. They didn't need transformation. They needed a week of someone who'd actually shipped the stuff.

Operators & Co. is that, at scale.

Team6 operators, 0 juniors
BasedManhattan · Remote
Clients$5M–$100M revenue
Engagements are
by application.

We take on four to six new engagements per quarter. That's the size we can staff well — enough to be useful, few enough that we can actually sit inside each operation. Applying first means we understand your business before the first call, and it spares both of us a sales meeting if we're not the right fit.

Start an application Reviewed within a week · no application fee
01
You apply
Eight questions about your business and the single problem you'd most want solved this year. Ten minutes, honest answers.
02
We review
Two of us read every application. You'll hear back within a week — a yes, a no, or a referral to someone better suited.
03
Working session
Ninety minutes, not a sales call. We walk through the problem together and leave with a shared view of what a useful engagement would look like.
04
Written proposal
If we're a fit, a fixed-scope, fixed-fee proposal within five business days. If we're not, we'll tell you that too.

A few questions.

Answer as much or as little as you like. The more specific you are about the bottleneck, the better our read.

We read every one. Reply within a week.