One engineer, at the leadership table,
on purpose.
Jovadan is a business automation and AI practice founded and run by Fernando Marques — an engineer who builds automations and AI tools businesses use every day: APIs, integrations, retrieval, internal tools, evaluations, observability. The practice serves founder-led professional-services firms in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, and operates remotely.
It is a practice of one, by design. The founder takes the call, ships the work, attends the kickoff and the readout. No subcontractors, no junior delegate, no agency layer. What that buys you is judgment without translation loss. What it costs you is a bench — which is why every system ships with runbooks, full IP ownership, and credentials that live in your accounts, not ours. If Jovadan disappeared tomorrow, everything keeps running and everything is yours. That is not a courtesy; it is the design.
Make room for the work that needs you
The practice exists because of a particular conviction: people should spend their time on work that needs their judgment, expertise, and relationships. An accountant needs room to consider what the numbers mean for a client. A consultant needs time to understand a difficult decision. An engineer needs the attention to spot a problem before it becomes expensive. Chasing the same document for the third time takes time away from all of that.
Before suggesting a tool, I look at how the work moves through the firm. Where does someone copy information from one place to another? Which handoff depends on a reminder? What waits in the founder’s inbox because nobody else knows the next step? Sometimes the answer is a clearer process. Sometimes it is a straightforward automation connecting tools you already use. AI earns its place when the task calls for interpreting language, organizing messy information, or preparing a draft for someone to review.
Keep judgment with the people doing the work
A routine reminder can follow a rule. A sensitive client conversation needs a person. A system can assemble the information for a proposal; someone who understands the client should decide what to recommend. I draw those boundaries with the team, including what can happen automatically, what needs approval, and what should stop and ask for help.
That is also how I think about hiring. An administrative coordinator brings organization, an operations manager brings leadership, and another professional brings expertise. Removing repetitive tasks can give the existing team more room, and sometimes make it possible to defer a hire. It does not turn every hour saved into a payroll reduction. The useful question is what your people can do with that time: serve another client, review work more carefully, follow through on an opportunity, or finish the day without taking the backlog home.
Stay until the change helps in everyday work
Getting there takes more than a recommendation. I work with the people who know the process, build around real examples, and check what happens when information is missing or something goes wrong. The team needs to understand the workflow, know when to step in, and be able to keep using it after the engagement ends. That is why the handover, documentation, and controls are part of the work from the beginning.
Success is visible in an ordinary week: fewer things to chase, fewer details to enter twice, and fewer interruptions that pull senior people away from a client or a decision. The point is to give people more of their attention back — and let them decide where it matters most.
The facts a diligence check looks for
Why “Jovadan”
Do even the boring things with all your heart, so you'll only have to do them once.” Jovadan Marques
I still remember a family dinner from when I was a kid. Ours is a family full of engineers. The TV stopped working — no warning, no reason, no context. My father, Andre, and his brothers Octavio, Ernesto and Giovanni gave us a side-smirk. “We got this,” they said. “Just go have dinner.”
Twenty minutes later the stress had set in. The TV was still dead, and the four of them stood around it, confused, each blaming the next.
Then my grandfather stepped in. Jovadan was a farmer who never learned to read and who spent his whole life learning anyway: from friends, from experience, from living. He asked, calmly, “have any of you checked the power transistor?” The room went quiet. Ernesto, the electrical engineer, was the only person there who knew what that was.
A couple of minutes and a little soldering later, the TV was working again.
After dinner I asked him how he had known. “I didn't,” he said. “I was just going to go through every part of that TV I recognize, until I found the one that was wrong.” I was too young to understand what I had just witnessed: my grandfather, who had never worked in tech or in an office, had done component isolation — a complete component-level troubleshoot, without ever having a name for it.
After a little more back and forth, I asked whether it was worth spending so much time on an old TV, and why he hadn't just left it and bought a new one.
“There's no need to buy a new one,” he said. “Things break. Things get difficult. We should try our best to get them back to working.”
“But why put so much effort into something so small?”
“Do even the boring things with all your heart, so you'll only have to do them once.”
The TV still works to this day.