Frequently Asked Questions

Yes. The majority of the work is digital — strategy, automation, platform management, and reporting — so geography isn’t a constraint. I work with independent taprooms, breweries, bars, entertainment venues, wineries, tasting rooms, and hospitality founders across the United States. Intro calls and onboarding happen over video. If an engagement requires on-site time, I’ll scope that separately.

The engagement starts with a free intro call, then, if it makes sense, a custom-quoted Platform & Tech Stack Audit with a 90-day roadmap. There’s no long-term contract required. After the roadmap, retainer engagements run month-to-month. You stay because the work is producing results, not because of a contract.

No. If you’re considering launching a membership or club program — wine club, mug club, loyalty tier, or something custom — the audit and roadmap phase is designed to evaluate whether it makes sense for your business and what the right structure looks like. I can build the program from scratch.

It means you get a Fractional Digital Lead and Senior Technical Builder: someone who manages your website, custom tools, CRM, and email without a full-time hire. I embed into your operations on a part-time, ongoing basis and own the digital side of your business, and I write the code myself.

Agencies typically deliver campaigns and reports, and hand the technical work to someone you never meet. A freelancer takes on defined tasks and moves on. As your Fractional Digital Lead I own the systems, make the technical decisions, and execute week to week. There’s no account manager in between: you work directly with the person who built your systems.

The stack varies by venue. I’m an official Brevo and Buffer partner and may earn a commission on those two, as disclosed on the Partners page. I’m an independent Commerce7 implementation specialist, not a certified Commerce7 partner. Other platforms I implement and support include Toast POS, Square, HubSpot, and Untappd. For venues with unique operational demands, I build custom tools and use Anthropic Claude, Google Gemini, and OpenAI for applied AI workflows. The governing principle is always simplicity and revenue impact: use the leanest tool that genuinely solves the operational problem.

Yes. When commercial SaaS forces your staff into workarounds or imposes steep monthly per-member fees, I architect and build purpose-built software. This includes touch-speed counter apps for member QR verification, offline-capable progressive web apps, live taproom data integrations, and conversational AI planning engines for experience brands. You can explore examples of this work in our Case Studies and on the Custom Software & AI Tools service page.

The audit reviews your recurring software costs, website performance, private-party pipeline, guest data capture, and local discovery. You get a written report with specific findings and a prioritized 90-day roadmap for what to remove, modernize, or build. You can run the roadmap yourself, hand it to another vendor, or hire me to build it.

Every project is different, so I scope it to your venue and quote it once I understand the work. The intro call is free. The Platform & Tech Stack Audit is quoted to your venue. Builds and migrations are scoped up front with defined deliverables and milestones. The Fractional Digital Lead retainer is a monthly investment based on the systems managed. What drives cost is scope, integrations, and ongoing support. Nothing is billed open-ended.

It depends on the work. The first weeks focus on the audit and on priority-setting: understanding what’s broken and in what order to fix it. Fixes to follow-up and inquiry handling can show up quickly; a platform migration or custom build runs on its own milestones, which we agree before work begins. I’ll tell you what I expect to move, and how we’ll measure it, before you commit.

It starts with the Platform & Tech Stack Audit if it makes sense after the intro call, a look at your full digital footprint: costs, website, email, CRM, and guest data. From that, I build a prioritized roadmap: what to fix immediately, what to build next, and what to defer. By day 30, you have a clear picture of what’s happening in your digital operation and a plan with no ambiguity about what I’m doing first.