Founder-led operating companies
The founder still touches the business. Growth is real. Operational friction is starting to eat the margin the founder built. A qualified diagnostic pays for itself in the first intervention.
Who it's for · Team
Mid-market commercial businesses whose leakage is visible on the P&L.
Not every company is ready for this kind of engagement. The ones that are tend to share three traits: they are operating, not venture-funded; their leakage is dollarizable; and someone on the inside owns the change.
01 / The companies we serve
Operating businesses across industries, roughly between the small-business and enterprise tiers.
We work horizontally because the Operational Leakage Map is horizontal. The five categories of leakage show up in every mid-market business we have ever looked at.
Professional-services firms
Law, accounting, consulting, specialty services. Realization and throughput problems that have compounded over years, a senior team that knows they exist, and no internal AI capability to solve them.
Multi-location and regional operators
Distribution, specialty retail, healthcare services, regional leaders. The friction lives in the gap between systems, and nobody has the leverage to fix it alone.
Trusted-advisor networks
Fractional CFOs, boutique consulting firms, advisors who already have the relationship. Our diagnostic is an artifact you can put in front of your clients and defend.
02 / The team
Two founders and one chair.
We are a small firm by design. We take on a limited number of engagements at a time. You work with the people whose names are on the page.
CEO & Lead Architect
Tate Carroll
Tate leads AI and architecture. Previously CTO at Prometheus Intelligence, where he scaled the business from $500K to $5M+ ARR in nine months. Before that, Staff AI Software Engineer at CACI. TS/SCI cleared. USAF veteran. He walks into an operation, maps where the leakage is, and owns the technical decisions that turn the map into a running system.
CTO & Lead Engineer
Hayden Cash
Hayden leads engineering and systems. A Coweta-raised hardware and full-stack engineer, he designed and prototyped AI systems that went from AutoCAD to 3D-printed units to machined hardware used in Army field testing — the kind of work profiled in the Newnan Times-Herald. At PeachStateAI he owns build and infrastructure: the code that runs, the integrations that hold, and the operational standards that make a system reliable once it is in production. If it ships with our name on it, Hayden is the reason it stays up.
Founding Advisor & Chair
James Shepard
James is our founding advisor and chair. Previously an attorney at Wilson Sonsini. Sitting mayor of Newnan, Georgia. He brings the institutional judgment that a small firm needs to operate at the scale of problems we take on.
04 / If this sounds like you
The qualifying call is the only way to tell whether we are the right fit.
We will be direct. If your business has the kind of leakage the Operational Leakage Map describes, we will say so. If it does not, we will say that too.