01
A practice · Est. 2026 · Portland

AI implementation,
shipped.

A practitioner-led boutique helping mid-market operators turn Claude into production workflows. Two-week audits. Six-week sprints. Senior-only delivery. No theater.

02
42%
of companies abandoned the majority of their AI initiatives before production. Up from 17% the year prior. (S&P Global, 2025)
The market

Most AI work dies in PowerPoint.

For two years, mid-market companies have been pitched AI strategy, AI roadmaps, AI transformation. Decks have multiplied. Production workflows have not.

The companies winning aren't the ones with the most consultants. They're the ones with operators who ship — quietly, repeatedly, into the parts of the business that actually move numbers.

Madrona exists for the operator who is done with theater and ready to put one workflow into production this quarter.

03
Engagements

Three ways to work.

03.1

Audit

Duration — 2 weeks Deliverable — Roadmap + 1 prototype

A focused two-week engagement to map where Claude actually ships ROI inside your operation. We interview stakeholders, document workflows, identify three to five high-leverage automation opportunities, and build a working prototype of the strongest one before we leave.

$5–8K
Fixed scope · 50% upfront
03.2

Sprint

Duration — 6 weeks Deliverable — Production workflow

Six weeks to take one workflow from prototype to production. Sales operations, customer support triage, finance close, data ops — we pick the one bleeding process and build the Claude-powered system that fixes it. Integrated into your stack, documented, owned by your team.

$20–30K
Fixed scope · Milestone billing
03.3

Embedded

Duration — Monthly retainer Deliverable — Continuous shipping

An ongoing arrangement for Sprint graduates ready to expand. We become the AI implementation function you don't yet have headcount for — shipping new workflows, optimizing existing ones, and training your team to take it in-house over time.

$5–8K
Per month · 3-month minimum
04
The approach

How we work.

A four-stage method built from real mid-market implementations. The same shape applies to every engagement — only the scope changes.

04.1

Listen

Stakeholder interviews. Workflow mapping. The boring, unglamorous work of understanding what the operation actually does before we talk about what AI could do.

04.2

Locate

Identify the three to five workflows where Claude is the right answer — and the ones where it isn't. Honest scoping. ROI math on the back of an envelope.

04.3

Build

Working prototypes in week one. Production systems by week six. Integrated into your stack, not parked in a sandbox waiting for someone to remember it exists.

04.4

Hand off

Documentation. Training. A team that owns what we built. We're not interested in being the only people who know how it works.

05
Differences

What this isn't.

Most AI consulting is strategy theater. Madrona is built differently — and explicitly not for everyone.

— Senior-only delivery

No junior bait-and-switch.

The person who sells you the engagement is the person who builds it. There is no second-tier team. There is no offshore handoff. Senior practitioners only, by design.

— Fixed scope, fixed price

Productized, not hourly.

Every engagement has a defined scope, a defined deliverable, and a fixed price agreed before work starts. No hourly billing. No surprise invoices. No incentive to drag the work out.

— Built to ship

Production over PowerPoint.

We don't deliver strategy decks. Every engagement ends with something running — a prototype, a workflow, a system in production. If you want a 60-slide roadmap, the Big 4 will sell you one.

— Owned, not rented

Your systems, your team.

What we build belongs to you. Documented, transferable, runnable without us. The goal is for our engagement to make us unnecessary, not indispensable.

06
The practitioner

One name on the contract.

Portrait · forthcoming
Founder & Principal

Mateo

Data analyst by training. AI implementation practitioner by trade. Madrona is founded on a simple thesis: the companies that win the next five years won't be the ones with the most ambitious AI strategy decks. They'll be the ones with the most workflows actually running.

Every engagement is delivered personally. There is no team to hand you off to — and that's the entire point.

07
Questions

What buyers usually ask.

What does the first engagement actually look like?

The Audit. Two weeks, fixed scope, $5–8K. Week one is stakeholder interviews and workflow mapping. Week two is prototyping the highest-ROI use case in Claude and writing the implementation roadmap. You finish the engagement with a working prototype, a prioritized list of automation opportunities, and a clear path to production. About 70% of Audit clients move directly into a Sprint.

Why fixed price instead of hourly?

Hourly billing rewards slow work and penalizes expertise. A practitioner who solves your problem in 10 hours instead of 20 earns half as much. Fixed pricing aligns the incentive correctly: we scope the outcome, price the value, deliver the work. If we finish early, that's our problem to manage — not your invoice to absorb.

How is this different from hiring a Big 4 consultancy?

Big 4 engagements typically run $500K to $3M for AI work, take six to twelve months to deliver first value, and split selling from delivery (the partner who sold you isn't the one doing the work). Madrona engagements run $5K to $30K, deliver in two to six weeks, and the founder is on every working session. Different products for different problems.

What kinds of workflows do you actually build?

Anything mid-market operators currently do by hand that benefits from language understanding, reasoning, or structured extraction. Sales call summarization and CRM hygiene. Customer support triage. Financial close prep. RFP response. Contract review. Document classification. Internal knowledge search. Operations reporting. If a person currently spends three hours a day on it, there's probably a workflow worth building.

What if the prototype doesn't work?

Sometimes the answer to an Audit is "Claude isn't the right tool for that specific workflow, and here's what is." We'd rather tell you that in week two than pretend otherwise for six weeks. The Audit fee covers the diagnostic work either way. We will not sell you a Sprint we don't believe will ship.

Do you work with companies under 50 people?

Occasionally — when the founder is technically literate and the workflow is unusually well-defined. More typically, Madrona is built for the 50–500 employee range where there's enough operational complexity to make implementation worthwhile and enough budget to invest in doing it properly.

Where are you based?

Portland, Oregon. Engagements run remote by default. On-site sessions for kickoffs and final readouts are available within reason.

08
Next step

The first move is a conversation.

Thirty minutes. No deck. We talk about where AI is stuck in your operation, what you've tried, and whether an Audit is the right next step. If it isn't, you leave with a clearer view than you came in with. That's the whole offer.

Or, more directly — mateo@madronaadvisory.com