A practice by Fernando Marques · For boutique founder-led firms

Fractional AI Officer
for the firm you've outgrown.

By Day Ninety, the firm runs without you in the middle of every decision. Three production AI systems shipped. A full FTE of capacity recovered. Embedded for the duration, scoped narrowly, retained at the leadership table. Thirty thousand dollars, fixed.

Every quarter, the same shape

A ceiling that doesn't feel
like growth. It feels
like staffing.

The instinct is to hire two more people just to keep up. The problem is rarely headcount. It is that there is no operational layer absorbing the repetitive work, so every decision flows through the founder.

1.
Drafting proposals from discovery transcripts, by hand, each time.
2.
Fielding the same client question for the tenth time this quarter.
3.
Chasing the same data across five tools to answer one question.
4.
Pushing meeting notes into the CRM by hand on Friday at six.
Build it in-house, or install it

You could hire a CTO.
It is the slower, costlier bet.

Dimension
Hiring a CTO
The Fractional AI Officer
Cost
~$250,000/year, plus benefits and recruiter fees
$30,000, ninety days, fixed
Time to first system
Six months to search, hire, and onboard
Roadmap by Day 14, first system shipped by Day 30
The bet
A permanent hire who may not be the fit
Ninety days, then you decide. No severance
Scope
A full tech-exec remit, most of it not AI
Narrow: AI and automation, shipped to production
If it stalls
Severance, and the search starts again
You keep the systems, runbooks, and roadmap

Faster and cheaper than a $30,000/month consultancy or a $15,000/month build agency, too, and it leaves working systems behind, not a deck.

About the practice

An engineer at the leadership table,
not the other way around.

Jovadan is a practice of one, by design. The founder takes the call. The founder ships the work. The founder is at the kickoff and at the readout. No subcontractors. No junior delegate. No agency layer between you and the engineer building the system.

The practice exists because of a particular conviction: the gap between we should be using AI and we have AI shipped in production is not a research problem. It is an operational one. And operational problems get solved by someone embedded at the leadership table, not by a vendor delivering a deck.

Premium-priced because the alternative (hiring a $250K CTO who arrives in six months and may not be a fit) is more expensive and slower than installing the function for ninety days and seeing what you actually need from it.

In practice: a weekly leadership call on Mondays, async Slack with a four-hour SLA, founder cell for the urgent. The role is at the leadership table, not on a ticket queue.

Who this is for

Boutique firms, founder-led,
where the founder is the bottleneck.

Agencies, accounting firms, law firms, advisory shops, consultancies. Refined enough to charge premium fees. Small enough that growth still means more late nights for the founder.

Revenue
$1M – $10MSweet spot, $2M – $6M annual.
Headcount
Five to thirtyIncluding the founder and partners.
Leadership
Founder-ledNo full-time CTO or Head of AI on the team.
Buyer
Founder or managing partnerOwns the P&L, makes the call.
Not for you if
  • You have a CTO building AI in-house. The fit is wrong, and so is the price.
  • You want a vendor to ship a thing and leave. This is embedded, not transactional.
  • You want to start small. The offer is one shape, ninety days, fixed fee.
  • The buyer is two layers removed from the founder. The engagement only works at the leadership table.
Ninety days. What happens, and when.

Three phases. Three production
systems. Embedded throughout.

Phase one
Days 1 – 14

Discovery & Roadmap

Stakeholder interviews, full workflow audit, an ROI-ranked opportunity matrix, a signed-off ninety-day plan. Nothing built yet, but the next seventy-six days are no longer guesswork.

Phase two
Days 15 – 90

Build Sprints

Three production AI systems shipped, one every thirty days. Built, deployed, monitored, evaluated, documented, trained-in. Each one lands with a kill switch.

Phase three
Days 1 – 90 · in parallel

Embedded Strategic Counsel

Weekly leadership call on Mondays. Async Slack with a four-hour SLA. Founder cell for the urgent. AI vendor and policy guidance, so you stop making AI decisions in isolation between Saturday and Monday.

What ships, every time

It is not a prototype.
It is production.

No we'll harden it later. No you'll need a developer to maintain this. Each of the three systems lands fully instrumented and owned by your team, with the runbook to keep it that way.

1.
Production deployment
on your stack,
versioned,
reproducible
2.
Observability dashboards
every call traced,
every error logged
3.
Evaluation suite
prompt changes
can't silently regress
4.
Founder-controlled kill switch
one toggle,
no tickets,
no calls
5.
One-page runbook
what it does,
who owns it,
what to do if
6.
Thirty-day stability commitment
handover is real,
not theoretical
What lands by Day Ninety

Three numbers, not
three adjectives.

~20hrs/wk
Hours per week reclaimedAcross the senior team. Time pulled out of admin and pushed back into billable, strategic, or creative work.
1 FTE
Of capacity unlockedA full headcount you didn't have to hire. Already in the building, just stuck in repetitive work.
15 – 25%
Margin liftFrom the same revenue base. The model gets more efficient before it gets larger.
One signature offer
$30,000

A fixed-fee, ninety-day engagement. No menu, no watered-down version. You enter through a short paid diagnostic.

First step
$5,000 diagnosticTwo weeks. An ROI-ranked roadmap you keep. Credited in full toward the engagement if you continue.
Engagement
$30,000Ninety-day fixed fee.
Continuation
$7,000 per monthMonth-to-month, after Day 30.
Payment
50 / 50 split$15,000 on signature · $15,000 at Day 45.
Cancellation
Thirty days' written noticeThe first thirty days are non-cancellable.
Long tail
$7K · $5K · $2K / monthRetainer · Optimization · Council.
First three engagements only

A different variant
of the same product.

Founding clients trade case-study rights and a measure of patience for material long-term savings, typically $90,000 to $160,000 across the first twenty-four months.

Dimension
Founders' Edition
Standard
Engagement
$30,000
$50,000
Continuation
$7,000/mo, locked for life
$10,000/mo
Case study
Named and public
Anonymized by default
Access
Founder cell · 4-hour SLA · monthly consigliere call
Standard 24-hour SLA

Delivery is identical across both. What changes are the terms of the relationship, and the price of the relationship over time.

Before the call

Honest answers, before
the conversation.

How does an engagement start?

A thirty-minute strategy call, then a paid two-week diagnostic at $5,000: stakeholder interviews, a full workflow audit, and an ROI-ranked roadmap you keep whichever way you decide. If you continue into the ninety-day engagement, the diagnostic fee credits in full toward it. It is the way in, not a smaller version of the work.

What if a system doesn't work as expected?

Every shipped workflow lands with an evaluation suite: prompt changes can't silently regress. Plus a kill switch you control, no tickets. The thirty-day post-deploy stability commitment is real: if something breaks in that window, fixing it is part of the engagement, not a change order.

Who owns the code and configurations you build?

You do. Full IP transfer, from Day One. Repositories, n8n flows, prompt libraries, runbooks, dashboards: all live in your accounts, on your stack, under your control. Nothing is hosted on a Jovadan-owned server that disappears if the engagement ends.

How is this different from hiring a consultant?

A consultant gives you a deck. The Fractional AI Officer gives you working systems in your stack, with your team trained to operate them. Ninety days from kickoff, the systems are running whether or not I'm still in the leadership chair. The deliverable is the production system, not the recommendation about the production system.

What about confidentiality and client data?

Self-hosted models or contracted enterprise endpoints only. Your client data does not leave systems you control. NDA on signature. Industry-specific compliance considerations (attorney-client privilege, accounting confidentiality, healthcare data) addressed before any system touches real data, not after.

Can I cancel mid-engagement?

After Day 30, with thirty days' written notice. Pro-rated for the unused portion. The first thirty days are non-cancellable: that's when the diagnostic and roadmap work happens, and skipping it would undermine everything that follows.

What happens at Day 90 if I want to continue?

Three paths. Continuation retainer at $7,000/month for ongoing AI Officer presence (locked for life on Founders' Edition terms). Optimization Partnership at $5,000/month for lighter scope. AI Council at $2,000/month for advisory-only access. Most clients continue in some form past Day 90.

Do you work with my existing engineering team?

Yes, when there is one. The scope stays narrow to AI and automation so your team stays focused on the core product. We collaborate on architecture and standards; I own delivery for AI workflows. Your engineers stop being interrupted by AI side-quests.

Can I see a sample of your work first?

Yes. The strategy call ends with a worked teardown of a comparable firm: the same framework applied to your firm's public footprint. It's a real artifact, not a pitch. After Founders' Edition closes, the case study from your engagement becomes part of the public materials. That's the trade.

A thirty-minute conversation

Worth seeing what
your firm becomes
on the other side?

The first three engagements are sold under Founders' Edition terms. Once the third is placed, the offer re-prices to Standard: $50,000 thereafter, $10,000 per month, no lifetime lock. The window is real, not theatrical.

Book a thirty-minute call → Or email fernando@jovadan.com

A bleed-finding conversation. No pitch deck. The strategy call ends with a worked teardown of your firm.

By email
Practice
Jovadan · Fractional AI Officer
Availability
Founding cohort, first three firms