There's a week of work a month happening in your office that shouldn't be.
We find it, cost it in hours and dollars, and hand you the fix in writing — whether or not you hire us to build it. One engineer, working directly with the owner.
Book an operations audit →Mornings go to voicemail, intake forms and rescheduling, instead of the people standing at the counter.
Quotes, proposals and engagement letters take two days, because one person writes every one from scratch.
The same client details get typed into three systems by three people, and the three systems disagree by Friday.
Lines nobody has reviewed since whoever chose them left. One of them costs more than a part-time salary.
Enquiries that didn't book get chased when someone remembers. Most months, nobody remembers.
Half the team already pastes client information into ChatGPT, and there's no written rule about what they can paste.
Operations Audit
Fixed fee · report inside 5 business daysA costed picture of where the manual work lives in your business, and what it's worth to fix. Plain language, numbers shown, yours to keep either way.
- 60–90 minute walkthrough of how the business actually runs — bring the software bill
- Top five opportunities ranked by hours saved against effort, each with a fixed price to fix
- Software spend check: what you rent monthly and use a fifth of, with break-even maths
- A "do not automate" list — what looks automatable but isn't worth the money or the risk
- 30-minute readout call to walk you through it
Training Day
Half-day or full-day · on-site or remoteOne working session, everybody hands-on at a keyboard, built on your team's real files and real workflows. No slide deck about the future of work.
- Pre-call to pick the 3–5 workflows worth transforming live
- Written playbook and prompt library your team keeps
- Rules on what must never be pasted into a chat window, in writing
- Follow-up call at two weeks to unstick anyone who stalled
Back-Office Assistant
Built for you · running inside a weekA system that does the work rather than reporting on it. Maintained monthly so it doesn't quietly rot six weeks after launch.
- Morning brief: the handful of things that genuinely need you, replies drafted
- Follow-up that actually happens — stale enquiries chased, drafted for your approval
- One page showing where the pipeline, the schedule and the money stand
- Monitoring, fixes, and one improvement a month
The walkthrough
60–90 minutes with you and, ideally, whoever runs the front desk. We follow the work, not the org chart.
The report
Inside five business days. Five ranked opportunities, hours and dollars on each, a fixed price to fix each one.
The readout
Half an hour to walk you through it and answer everything. Your team can act on any of it without us.
Your call
Book a fix, book the training, or take the report in-house. The fee credits in full for 30 days either way.
Software you own instead of software you rent.
If the audit turns up a tool you pay hundreds a month for and use a fifth of, we can rebuild the fifth you use as software you own outright.
Ask about your software bill →- Scope comes straight from the audit — the workflows you actually use, mapped
- Your data, your hosting, your repository, documented and handed over
- Old and new run side by side for a full billing cycle before you cancel anything
- One-time build fee, typically paying for itself inside eighteen months
- Optional care plan for hosting and patching — decline it and the code is still yours
Anything compliance-heavy
Payroll, tax filing, accounting of record, clinical records — anything that would put protected health information through a system we built. That stays with the specialists and the software carrying the liability.
Replace software that's good value
Plenty of what you pay for is cheap for what it does, or worth it because everyone else is on it. We'll say so, and it costs you nothing to hear it.
Automate judgement
Some of what looks automatable is the part where your experience shows. Automating it saves an hour and costs a client. That list is in the report too.
Sell you a build the audit didn't justify
If you're already running lean, we'd rather tell you and keep the relationship than invoice you for a project neither of us believed in.
Owner-run businesses with real revenue and no spare hours.
The common thread isn't an industry, it's a shape: healthy margins, a small team wearing several hats each, and nobody whose job is to look at how the work flows.
- Dental practices & orthodontists
- Oral & cosmetic surgery
- Dermatology & med spas
- Plastic surgery practices
- Private medical practices
- Fertility clinics
- Veterinary hospitals
- Personal injury law firms
- Corporate & estate law
- Accounting firms & CPAs
- Wealth management
- Insurance brokerages
- Commercial real estate
- Property management
- General contractors
- Roofing, HVAC & plumbing
- Restoration & specialty trades
- Architecture & engineering
- Interior design studios
- Agencies & production companies
- Staffing & executive search
- Private schools & clubs
- Luxury & independent dealerships
- Wedding & event venues
Joe Waine
Grand Street Works is one Brooklyn engineer with 90+ shipped projects — automations, internal tools, and the unglamorous plumbing that connects a business's software to itself. The person in your discovery call is the person who writes the report and the person who builds the fix. I take a small number of engagements at a time, and I'd rather turn work down than staff it out to someone you've never met.
| Entity type | Solo practice |
| Base of operations | Brooklyn, New York |
| Works with | Owners and practice managers, directly |
| First step | Fixed-fee operations audit |
| Engagements | Remote across the US · on-site in NYC |
| Sister practice | Grand Street AI — for technical teams shipping AI |
We're too small for this.
Smaller usually makes the maths better, not worse. In a ten-person firm one person is doing four jobs, so an hour returned to them is an hour returned to four functions. The businesses that get least out of this are the large ones with an operations team already asking the same questions.
We tried ChatGPT and it was underwhelming.
That's the usual experience, and it's the right conclusion from the wrong experiment. Typing questions into a chat box isn't the same as changing how a workflow runs. The audit looks at where the hours actually go — intake, scheduling, quoting, follow-up, double entry — and plenty of the fixes are ordinary software rather than AI.
Is our client data safe?
The first thing the audit produces is a list of what should never leave your systems, and a written rule for your team about what can and can't be pasted into a chat window. Anything we build runs on your accounts and your hosting, and nothing gets write access until you've watched it work with drafts and approvals first. We stay out of clinical records, payroll and anything else carrying regulatory liability.
Who maintains whatever you build?
Your choice. There's an optional monthly care plan covering hosting, patching and small changes, priced well below the subscription it usually replaces — or your own IT can hold it, because the code is documented and it's yours. Declining the care plan doesn't cost you access to anything.
Aren't you just a new kind of lock-in?
You own the repository, the data and the infrastructure accounts, and that's in the contract rather than in a sales conversation. If you want to move to another engineer, everything they need is already in your possession. Replaceable by design.
What if switching breaks something we depend on?
Nothing gets cancelled on a promise. When we replace a tool, old and new run side by side for a full billing cycle, and you only cancel once the new one has done the job for a month with your real work going through it.
What does it cost, and how much of our time does it take?
Everything is a fixed fee agreed before work starts — no hourly billing and no scope-creep conversations. The audit is deliberately the cheapest way in and credits 100% against anything booked in the following 30 days. Your side of it is one 60–90 minute call, a short email thread, and a 30-minute readout.