Questions to ask before you hire us

Send Holden a message from the contact page or by email, and tell us what’s going on. The first conversation is free, and in it we walk through one real process with you and give you an honest read. If there’s a real path, the next step is usually a working session with the people who do the work, at their desks or around a whiteboard. If you’d rather see the whole picture first, we also offer an Opportunity Assessment: half a day to a full day on site, followed by a written plan you keep whether or not we go further.

How an engagement runs

Yes. Sometimes the honest answer is “not yet,” along with the one thing that would change it, such as getting a particular export from your ERP vendor. Sometimes it’s that your own people could build it themselves. Either way, you hear it before you’ve spent anything.

No. Our deepest work so far, as of fall 2026, has been inside West Michigan manufacturers. The same method applies anywhere people run on repeatable document work, and non-profits, manufacturers’ reps and distributors, and other organizations are welcome.

Who we serve

We’re based in West Michigan. Working sessions, training and the handoff happen on site with your people, and some of the build work between sessions runs remotely, inside your company’s accounts.

Yes. Richardson Applied AI is Holden’s practice, and the person in your first conversation is the person who scopes the work and builds it with your team. That’s part of why everything is built in your company’s accounts and written into your Operating Standard, and why the handoff is a test your people take: your Champions have to show they can run the system, fix a failure and make a change without his computer, accounts or help. If he’s unavailable partway through a project, what’s already built is in your accounts and written down, not locked up on his side.

About Holden

Every engagement is scoped independently, and we don’t publish prices. Conversations are always free. When the first conversation shows a real path, the next step is usually a working session with the people who do the work, and that’s typically free too. Paid work, like an Opportunity Assessment, a feasibility test or a first project, is scoped in writing first. The scope says what the work is, the result it’s aiming for, what’s excluded, and a limit you approve before anything starts. Work stops at that limit unless you approve more.

When we can’t tell from a conversation whether something will work, we propose a small, paid test on your real documents before any bigger commitment. It ends in a written recommendation to go, change course, or stop. Stopping is an acceptable outcome, and you haven’t paid for a big build on a guess.

It depends on the process and on what’s already in place, so we don’t give a blanket timeline. The first project covers one process, and its scope says how we’ll test that it’s done. You see it working on real jobs before the next one starts, and our progress updates never carry a made-up deadline.

No. Ongoing support, which we call Cadence, is optional and month to month. It covers upkeep when models or document formats change, measurement reviews, training and new work. You can cancel any month and everything keeps working, because it all runs in your accounts.

Your company does. The Operating Standard, the code, the written instructions, the settings and the accounts are all in your company’s name, with at least two of your own people as owners. We’re never the owner, and our access is limited to what the work needs.

What we install

What we build runs in your company’s accounts, not ours. We choose the AI tools and their settings with you, including how each provider handles your data, and sensitive information is kept separate by who’s allowed to see it. Confidentiality terms, including what we keep on our side for the project, go in the written agreement.

Your people use it on their own computers, signed in as themselves. When a process has to run on a schedule, it runs on a company-owned machine or cloud account set up with your IT provider, with its own login and only the access it needs.

Security is part of the foundation we set up before anything is built. Each person and each automated job gets its own login with only the access it needs, and passwords live in your company’s password manager, never in documents or AI chats. We work with your IT team or IT provider on anything that touches your network, email or logins. Telling an AI in writing not to do something doesn’t count as a security control, so we rely on account permissions instead.

Whichever fits the work, chosen with you, and we’re not tied to any of them. The Operating Standard and the Skills are plain written files any capable AI can follow, so you can move to a better model and keep what you built. We count a switch as done only after the process has been tested end to end on the new model.

No. Your ERP stays the system of record. We read from it through approved exports and views, and anything written back goes through a path you’ve approved and tested. One system stays in charge of each record, so two tools never fight over the same data.

Those features work inside one vendor’s product, and some of them are worth using. The work that stalls usually crosses systems and people: the RFQ in email, the print on a shared drive, the costs in the ERP and the judgment in an estimator’s head. We build around how your company does that work, write it into an Operating Standard you own, and leave the ERP in charge of its records. If a tool you already pay for covers the job, we’ll tell you to use it.

No. If you have one, or an outside IT provider, we bring them in early, and anything touching your network, email, logins or security goes through them. What you do need is a person inside who can own the system after we leave.

Show us the work, and check it. The people who do a process walk us through it, decide where a person reviews the result, and test the new way on real jobs. One or two of them become Champions, who own the system after the handoff. Plan on their time in working sessions and training, and on real jobs while each process is built.

Yes, as its own project. We build custom sites around how a business takes in work, like quote requests with the drawings attached and service or maintenance requests. A site can also hold your catalogs, spec sheets, and certifications, and it passes what it collects to the next step. Each build is scoped and quoted in writing. A website is never required before AI work, and if yours already works, we leave it alone.

Websites

Your own people. You own the domain, the hosting account, and the site’s code from the start, and we build the site so someone on your team can keep it current with an AI assistant. That’s usually the same Champions who own your AI work. We train them before the handoff, and the handoff is done when one of them has made a real change from start to finish. We don’t take on ongoing website maintenance, and new functionality later, like a customer login or a scheduling tool, is scoped as a new project.