Rivet Automation

Rivet Automation Rivet helps Metro Detroit home service business owners get more leads and save more time by automating the busywork that eats their profits and their evenings.

Rivet automates after hour answering, invoicing, quote follow up and hiring.

08/12/2026

If you run on EOS, here's my Q4 challenge.

AI doesn't belong on your issues list. It belongs on your Rock sheet.

"Implement AI" has been sitting on somebody's issues list at every company I've walked into this year. It's a wish — and wishes carry over quarter after quarter.

A real Rock: AI handles first-pass estimates by November 30. It has an owner (whoever owns estimating, not whoever's most technical). It has a scorecard number. If the number moves, it worked. No demos. No vibes.

One Rock per quarter. Four built assets a year. Two years from now that's a back office running twice the volume with the same headcount.

Q4 planning is coming. What's your AI Rock?

08/11/2026

There's a $600K number hiding in your growth plan. Almost nobody puts it on the whiteboard.

It's what the growth costs you in overhead.

Every $2M of growth adds another admin. Grow from $9M to $15M the conventional way and you add roughly $600K/year of G&A — permanently.

And if you ever sell? Service businesses trade at 4–6x EBITDA. Every $100K of overhead you don't add is worth up to $600K at exit.

The smartest operators I talk to have one goal: scale without scaling G&A. Same back office at $15M they had at $9M.

That's not a hiring freeze. That's a build plan. More at rivetops.io.

08/10/2026

A $9M owner told me: "I don't want my people to be consumers of AI. I want them to be creators with AI."

His whole team has ChatGPT. He's not impressed — and he's right not to be.

A consumer saves 10 minutes on an email. A creator builds something that keeps working after the tab closes: an estimating assistant trained on your pricing, a phone agent that answers during the storm, an analyst that reads job costing every Friday.

88% of companies are "using AI." Only 17% see real money from it. The gap isn't technology. It's consuming vs. creating.

Which side of that line is your team on? More at rivetops.io.

He told me it was "probably impossible." Getting his estimates into his CRM automatically — closed system, no open API, ...
08/07/2026

He told me it was "probably impossible." Getting his estimates into his CRM automatically — closed system, no open API, that's what he'd been told, so that's what he believed.

I told him I'd build a demo anyway, and we'd decide together.

His estimators spend 15 to 30 minutes walking the property and another 15 to 30 typing up the estimate — usually between appointments or at night. And every hour after you leave the customer, the close rate decays.

Now he hits record, does his walkthrough, and talks. Ninety seconds after he stops he gets two links: an internal breakdown — every tree inventoried, priced line items, his math checked, crew notes written the way he'd write them — and a branded proposal the customer can sign right on the lawn.

And the job record lands in his CRM. The "impossible" part. Notes, line items, the works.

It even caught that he quoted a friend $1,700 instead of the ~$1,980 book price. Cost to run: about a dime per estimate.

His text back: "bro, that is awesome."

If you run a business, here's the takeaway. "Probably impossible" usually means nobody had a reason to try. And now that a working demo costs a day instead of a quarter, that sentence shouldn't end conversations anymore.

Stop asking what's possible. Ask them to show you.

08/05/2026

"What's the best way to stay up to date with AI?" After 20 years in Fortune 500 tech consulting, my answer surprises people: stop chasing the tools.

AI tools are maybe 90% accurate at best, and something new launches every week. But they don't fail because the AI is bad. They fail because the tool has no context on your business — your customers, your pricing, your process, what "good" looks like in your shop. It demos great, then it can't do the job.

So build three things that compound instead. Pick one tool and get great with it — use it for everything for 30 days, and when a better one shows up next year, you carry the context over with one prompt. Know your workflows cold — AI can only automate what you can describe. And hire AI like an employee, not a tool — onboard it, correct it, ask for a deliverable, not an answer.

The tools will keep changing. Context won't.

rivetops.io

08/05/2026

Your close rate decays by the hour.

I rode along with an estimator last week and watched her build a proposal in her car, just to hand it over before she left the driveway. Smart. She knows the best time to close is on-site.

Most contractors lose jobs not on price, but to the clock. The proposal you hand over today beats the one you email in three days, every time.

Shrink the time between the conversation and the number, and you don't need more leads to make more money.

How long does it take you to get a proposal out? Drop it below.

"What's the best way to stay up to date with AI?"I get this a lot. Here's my slightly contrarian answer after 20+ years ...
08/04/2026

"What's the best way to stay up to date with AI?"

I get this a lot. Here's my slightly contrarian answer after 20+ years in Fortune 500 tech consulting, watching wave after wave of technology roll through:

The tools don't matter. At least not as much as where and how you use them.

AI tools are maybe 90% accurate at best, and something new launches every week. But they don't fail because the AI is bad. They fail because the tool has no context on your business. It doesn't know your customers, your pricing, your process, or what "good" looks like in your shop. It demos great, then can't do the job.

So flip the question. Instead of "how do I stay current on tools," build three things that compound:

1. Pick one tool and get great with it. Claude, ChatGPT, the specific one matters less than people think. Use it for everything for 30 days. Live in it. Train it, challenge it, let it challenge you. When a better tool shows up next year, you carry that context over with one prompt.

2. Know your workflows cold. AI can only automate what you can describe. The operators getting real value aren't the ones with the fanciest tools. They're the ones who know exactly how work moves through their business and where the real constraint is.

3. Hire AI like an employee, not a tool. Onboard it. Give it the context a new hire would get. Correct it. Connect it to the systems it needs. Give it a job description and a standard, and ask for a deliverable, not an answer. People who use it like Google get slightly better search results and decide it's overhyped. People who onboard it like a new hire get leverage.

For staying current without drowning, I lean on basically one source: Greg Isenberg's Startup Ideas podcast. What's actually working in real businesses, not demos. One good filter beats twenty newsletters, because newsletters keep you reading about tools instead of using them.

The tools will keep changing. Context, knowing your real workflows, and treating AI like an employee won't.

That's where I'd put your attention.

What's the one tool you've actually gone deep on?

Most contractors I talk to have "tried AI" and walked away unimpressed. They played with ChatGPT, wrote a few emails, th...
08/02/2026

Most contractors I talk to have "tried AI" and walked away unimpressed. They played with ChatGPT, wrote a few emails, thought "that's it?"

The problem isn't the AI. It's that they're using it like a tool instead of hiring it like an employee.

The shift I'd make if you run a contracting business:

1) Stop asking AI to write things. Start having it DO things. The value isn't a better email, it's an agent that gives you real ops insights, answers every call, follows up on every lead, and books the appointment.

2) Point it at your biggest thing slowing the business down. For most contractors that's missed calls and dead follow-up, not marketing. Fix the leak before you spend another dollar on leads.

3) Measure it like a hire and give it feedback. If you can't measure it and you don't give it feedback it won't deliver results.

That's exactly what I'm walking through with the Builders Association of Southeastern Michigan's National Association of Home Builders Sales & Marketing Council workshop next month, getting members past the AI hype and into the parts that actually move revenue.

If you're a contractor who's written AI off, you probably just haven't seen it used right yet.

07/31/2026

A $3M installation contractor was spending 8–12 hours every week reading blueprints and building estimates by hand. 60 to 90 minutes each.

But that wasn't even the real problem.

The real problem: 3 years of pricing logic, how he reads a plan, what he assumes, how he prices risk, lived entirely in his head. New estimators couldn't just learn that overnight. It took years.

So we watched him do it, documented the logic, and built it into a tool. Upload the blueprint, get an estimate in under 2 minutes.

Yes, 90 minutes became 2. But the bigger win: his estimators stopped memorizing three years of his brain and got back in front of customers, where they actually add value.

🎥 From my conversation on The Creative AI Show with Bryon Scott (Great Scott Social Media) and Rosh Sillars (Rosh Media).

07/30/2026

I fully expected her to be frustrated with me.

A tree service owner I work with was capped — his marketing worked, but he couldn't answer all the inbound calls. Three people on phones and still drowning. So we put in an AI booking agent to answer and schedule.

New system, real learning curve, a few early mistakes. I figured his front-desk lead — the one everyone said the business couldn't run without — would be the first to push back.

Five days after a storm, I asked how it was going. Her first word: "Amazing."

Then: "You don't even know. Five days after a storm I'd still be digging out of voicemails, talking to angry customers who wanted service five days ago."

Instead, she spent those days doing what she's actually great at — scheduling crews, talking to customers, keeping the team on track. Done right, AI doesn't replace your best people. It hands them back their day.

🎥 From my conversation on The Creative AI Show with Bryon Scott (Great Scott Social Media) and Rosh Sillars (Rosh Media).

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