Custom AI tools · Twin Cities, MN
Know what's slipping before it costs you.
Mike Z. Consulting builds custom AI tools, CRMs, office automations, and websites for real estate offices, local businesses, and small offices — so the follow-ups, reports, and busywork stop depending on someone remembering.
MBA · 16 years in operations and finance
Controller → Business Systems Manager → Production Manager
Manufacturing & specialty construction
Two items need a nudge today. Draft emails are written and waiting for your OK.
One expiring certificate with no renewal scheduled. Everything else is covered.
Avg. response time: 1.4 days (down from 3.1 in May)
Falling behind: D. Petersen — 4 open items past due
Carrying the most: A. Kraus — 11 items, all current
Needs a decision from you:
Change order #22 has been sitting 9 days with no client reply.
Sent to the owner and office manager every Monday at 7:00 AM.
Recent work
Three things I've built lately
Each one started with somebody spending too much of their week on something a system should handle. Thirty seconds each, sound on.
STYLE Hair Salon · Ellsworth, WI
Getting a salon found on Google
A new website and Google Business Profile in the first week, then a content plan and a results report every week. Her Google profile now shows 224 interactions, and 303 people have viewed it.
Google and follower numbers read Nov 6, 2026. The 1,110 is Facebook and Instagram followers added together.
A real estate office
One CRM instead of scattered files
105 vendors, 65 events, and 27 trades in one place, with sponsors tracked by trade, plus a recruiting tracker that keeps form, interview, notes, and decision on one record.
Names hidden and screens redrawn for privacy. Office shots are illustrative.
A local real estate office
An office event that runs itself
Sign-ups, taken-cookie conflicts, one tracking sheet, and the day-before reminder all happen on their own. The office Secret Santa runs on the same kind of setup. Built on Google Forms and Sheets.
Shown with test data. Its first live run is this holiday season.
Real estate offices and teams
The problemVendors, recruits, events, and follow-ups live in a dozen places.
What I buildA shared CRM, a recruiting tracker, event sign-ups and rosters, and morning email briefs.
Local shops and service businesses
The problemGood at the work, hard to find online, and no time to fix it.
What I buildA website, a Google Business Profile, a weekly content plan, and a report that shows what moved.
Offices with an office manager and no ops person
The problemFollow-ups slip in professional services, construction, and manufacturing, and you hear about it late.
What I buildAn AI operations assistant that tracks open items, runs the reports, and drafts the chase emails.
Owners and agents buried in email
The problemThe important messages get lost in everything else.
What I buildA morning email brief with each item linked straight to its message. Works with Gmail and other IMAP inboxes; Microsoft 365 isn't supported yet.
I also offer hands-on AI lunch-and-learns for chambers and business groups. Ask me about one.
The real problem
It isn't your people. It's the follow-up.
Nothing tells you what's late
The information lives in inboxes, spreadsheets, and someone's head. By the time an owner hears about a missed follow-up, it's already a problem with a cost attached.
Accountability eats the week
Your office manager spends hours chasing status instead of running the office. Management turns reactive because the only signal is a complaint.
The software you bought doesn't fit
Off-the-shelf tools are half-configured and half-ignored, because they were designed for someone else's process — not the one your team actually uses.
The work it takes off your desk
What an AI operations assistant actually does
Not a chatbot. A quiet piece of software built around your process that watches the things people forget to watch, and tells the right person early enough to fix it.
- 01
Tracks every open follow-up
Who owes what, to whom, by when — pulled from the places the work already lives, not a new system your team has to remember to update.
- 02
Flags who's falling behind
Surfaces the person or the item that's drifting, before the deadline, so a nudge fixes it instead of a meeting.
- 03
Watches the calendar for gaps
Expiring certificates, renewals nobody scheduled, reviews that quietly fell off, double-bookings. The absences are what hurt you.
- 04
Runs the recurring reports
The Monday status, the month-end pull, the job-by-job summary — written, formatted, and delivered without anyone assembling it by hand.
- 05
Drafts the chase emails
Reminders written and queued for approval, so following up costs a click instead of twenty minutes and a bad mood.
- 06
Sends a weekly digest
One page to the owner and office manager: what closed, what slipped, what needs a decision. The whole office in ninety seconds.
A recommendation is only worth something if it could have gone the other way.
Mike Zwirgzdas — on why the assessment is paid
Three steps · No long contract
How we work together
Every engagement starts small and paid, so you can judge the work before committing to a build. You decide at each step whether there's a next one.
Operations assessment
$750
Flat fee — credited toward your build
- On-site or remote review of how work actually moves through your office
- Written findings: where follow-ups break and what it's costing
- A specific recommended pilot, scoped and priced
- Yours to keep, even if we stop here
Pilot build
$4,000 – $8,000
Fixed price, agreed before work starts
What moves the numberHow many systems the assistant has to read from, and how many workflows it watches. One workflow reading one system sits at the low end. The assessment tells you which before you commit to anything.
- A working assistant fit to your process, not a template
- Task tracking, follow-up monitoring, and the reports you named
- Set up with your team and documented in plain language
- Before-and-after measured in real numbers
Ongoing support
$500 – $1,500/mo
Month to month — cancel anytime
What moves the numberHow much the assistant is doing and how often it changes. A single stable workflow sits at the low end; several workflows you keep adding to sits at the top.
- The assistant keeps running reports and monitoring calendars
- Maintenance, fixes, and improvements as your process changes
- New workflows added as you find them
- A direct line to the person who built it
Why paid up front: a $750 assessment costs less than one week of the problem, and it means the recommendation is honest — I'm not writing a proposal to win free work. If the assessment says you don't need a build, that's what it will say.
Smaller jobs are simpler. A website, a Google setup, or a single event automation doesn't need the assessment. Tell me about it on the free call and I'll quote it from there.
Free · No account
Try a small piece of it right now
Paste in the notes from your last meeting — the messy version, the fragments you actually typed. You get back every action item with a name and a date on it, the decisions that were made, and a follow-up email ready to send. It also flags every item nobody agreed to own, and it will not invent an owner or a date your notes didn’t give it.
It isn’t magic — you still read it before you send it. But that’s two minutes instead of forty, and it’s the smallest version of what a full assistant does on its own, every week, without being asked.
Fit
Who this is built for
A good fit
- ✓ Real estate offices, local shops and service businesses, and professional-services, construction, and manufacturing offices
- ✓ You have an office manager but no operations person
- ✓ Follow-ups, approvals, or renewals slip and you find out late
- ✓ The owner still gets pulled into status-chasing
- ✓ You'd rather fit the tool to your process than the reverse
Not a fit
- ✕ You want a generic chatbot dropped on your site
- ✕ You're looking for an AI strategy deck rather than working software
- ✕ Your processes are already tightly instrumented and enforced
- ✕ Nobody internally will own the change once it's built
Who you'd be working with
Built by someone who has run the office, not just the software.
I spent sixteen years inside small and mid-sized companies before building anything for them. Five years as a plant controller at Federal-Mogul, then eleven at MG McGrath — a specialty subcontractor — first as assistant controller, then as business systems manager, and now as production manager on the leadership team.
That path matters for one reason: I've been the person who had to find out what was late. I've built the spreadsheets, chased the approvals, and rolled out the software that half the team quietly stopped using. I know why those tools fail, and it's almost never the technology.
Large companies solve this with an operations team. Small and mid-sized offices deserve the same visibility, sized and priced for what they actually are. That's the entire idea behind this business.
Twin Cities south metro. On-site where it helps, remote where it doesn't.
Before you book
Questions owners ask
What is an AI operations assistant, exactly?
It's custom software that runs quietly in the background of your office. It watches your open items, deadlines, and calendars, then tells the right person what needs attention — by email, on a dashboard, or wherever your team already looks. Unlike a chatbot, nobody has to talk to it for it to be useful.
How much does a custom AI assistant cost to build?
The assessment is $750 flat and is credited toward your build. Pilot builds run $4,000 to $8,000 at a fixed price agreed before work starts. What moves you within that range is how many systems the assistant reads from and how many workflows it watches — one workflow reading one system sits at the low end. Ongoing support runs $500 to $1,500 per month depending on how much the assistant is doing and how often it changes.
No hourly billing and no open-ended scope. You'll have an exact number before the build starts, and the assessment is what produces it.
How long does a pilot take?
Most pilots go from assessment to working software in three to six weeks. The first version is deliberately narrow — one workflow that hurts — so you can see whether it changed anything before expanding it.
Do we have to replace the software we already use?
No. The assistant is designed to sit alongside what you have and read from it. Replacing your accounting, project management, or scheduling system is expensive and disruptive, and it's rarely what's actually broken.
What happens to our data?
The assistant only touches the systems and data you explicitly connect it to, and access is scoped to what the workflow needs. We put the specifics in writing before anything is built, and I'll walk your team through exactly what it can and can't see.
Do you build websites and CRMs, or only AI assistants?
Both. I build websites and Google Business Profiles for local businesses, CRMs and trackers for offices, and automations for recurring jobs like office events. The AI operations assistant is the largest of these, not the only one.
What size company is this for?
I work with businesses from a solo owner up to about 50 people. Websites, Google setup, and single automations suit the smallest businesses. A full operations assistant fits best at roughly 15 to 50 employees, big enough that follow-ups fall through the cracks and small enough that there's no operations department to catch them.
Do you only work with companies in the Twin Cities?
The assessment works best on-site, so Minneapolis–St. Paul and the surrounding metro is the primary service area — Eagan, Burnsville, Apple Valley, Lakeville, Bloomington, Eden Prairie, Shakopee, Woodbury and nearby. Remote engagements outside Minnesota are possible once the assessment is done.
What if the assessment says we don't need this?
Then that's what it says, and you keep the written findings. A recommendation is only worth something if it could have gone the other way.
Next step
Twenty minutes, no charge, no pitch deck.
Tell me where things slip in your office. I'll tell you straight whether this is worth doing, what it would look like, and roughly what it would cost. If it isn't a fit, I'll say so on the call.