PROOF, NOT PROMISES
Real tools, running in real organizations.
Given is a new name, but the work isn't. Two engagements below — a contractor's whole operation and a university program's data backbone — both ending the way every Given project ends: with them owning everything.
CASE — GENERAL CONTRACTOR, LEXINGTON KY
01 / 03
0Roles documented
0Custom tools shipped
0Pricing source of truth
The brief: make the company run on systems instead of memory.
A small general contractor with real crews, real jobs, and real cash flow — where pricing, process, and job knowledge lived in people's heads and scattered files. The classic small-business risk: the company can't run without the owner in the room.
Field walkthrough tool
Live, used in the field. An iPad-first wizard that replaced the paper bid sheet — scope, site conditions, fifteen trade-specific fields, photos. On submit it creates the job folder, writes the sheet, and emails the team an estimate summary. No re-keying, no lost paper.
Public instant estimator
Live, customer-facing. A branded tool on the company's own website: a prospect fills eleven fields and gets a same-second estimate by email, while sales gets a parallel alert. Markup, minimums, and difficulty modifiers all baked into the math.
Unified pricing engine
Both tools pull rates from one spreadsheet — change a number once and every quote everywhere updates. Each rate validated against real completed jobs.
Company hub
A card-based portal the team lands on every morning, rebuilt on demand by a script that crawls the company's own files. Their whole Drive reorganized into a 14-bucket library with one canonical home for every document.
The business itself
Not just software. A reworked org chart with clear reporting lines, defined roles and position descriptions, and the operating processes to match — the company got organized, not just computerized.
Role playbooks
A "10 Vital Processes" document for each of five roles — drafted from real interviews, then validated line-by-line with the actual person in the seat.
The tech
Google Apps Script, HTML/JS, Google Sheets. That's it. No subscriptions, no vendor lock-in, no AI dependence — it runs on tools the company already had, plus code they now own outright.
The handoff
Every script and deployment transferred to the company's own account — same URLs, zero disruption — with a written "State of the System" covering what's built, where it lives, and who owns what. No ongoing dependency on us to keep the lights on.
Weekly sit-down → build → demo → tweak. Every system came from what the team actually described needing — shown back to them working, then adjusted.
The engagement model, straight from the case file
CASE — UNIVERSITY MENTORSHIP PROGRAM
02 / 03
The brief: run a mentorship program on data instead of scattered lists.
A university business school's mentorship program — hundreds of mentors, mentees, and contacts living across seven disconnected spreadsheets, two professors' contact lists, and memory. Different world than a contractor; exact same disease.
One clean roster
610 people, deduped from 635 raw records across seven sources into a single relational roster — rebuilt through five generations until the refresh was one button the program directors pressed themselves, live, in the demo.
Command center
A 3,790-line browser app — dashboard, people, pairings, event insights — that opens like a file and runs entirely on the program's own machines. No cloud account, no hosting bill, no login to lose. Deliberately.
Pairing engine
A matching system that reads every profile and pre-computes the top five mentor–mentee suggestions for each person, with a visual workspace for one-click pairing decisions. 61 pairings supported in year one.
The operations
The program's first web page, survey-chase text automation, and event ops — RSVP tracking and three attendance channels reconciled into one funnel, with the annual banquet drawing ~2.3× the prior year's attendance.
The tech
Excel as the source of truth, plus scripts and plain HTML/JS. Built so the next person who's never seen it can run it — with a self-onboarding tour and a runbook inside the app.