A fractional AI operator for your parts portfolio companies
If you own asset-heavy parts or industrial businesses, I go in and automate the manual work that's quietly costing the team hours every week, then stay on only if the first project earns it.
Who this is for
You're an operating partner with a parts distributor, a components manufacturer, or some other asset-heavy industrial business in the portfolio. The team runs on an ERP like Prophet 21 or Epicor, a pile of spreadsheets, and a few people who know where the numbers live.
Those people spend hours a week on work a computer should be doing. Quotes get typed out by hand. And every month someone burns half a week reconciling exports line by line to close the books. None of it needs a new system or a six-figure software project. It needs someone who can sit with the work and automate the boring parts.
That's what I do. There's no platform to buy and no roadmap I hand off. I go into one portco, find the work costing the most hours, and make it run without a person.
What I deploy first in a portco
I start where the hours are going, wherever a person is doing the same manual job over and over. In parts and industrial businesses that's almost always one of these three.
Quoting and RFQ handling
Reps in a parts distributor spend real hours turning an RFQ into a quote: looking up the part, checking a cross-reference, pulling current pricing, formatting the response. A lot of that is lookup and assembly a tool can do in seconds, with a person checking it before it goes out.
Weekly ops reporting
The report someone rebuilds every Monday from a few system exports is a good first target. I've built exactly this on the channel: a button that pulls the data, refreshes the numbers, and can even update itself overnight so nobody touches it.
Reconciliation
Comparing figures across sources, flagging where they disagree, and writing up why is slow, careful work that burns a chunk of a controller's month-end. It's also the kind of work these tools are good at, with the judgment calls left to your people.
These aren't hypotheticals. They're the same builds I publish on the Rubicon AI channel, on the kind of data a portco already has.
How an engagement runs
We start small and fixed. One project, one price, scoped after a short call with the portco's team so I understand where the hours go. You know the number before I start, and what you get out of it is a working automation the team can use the next day.
If that first project pays for itself, we keep going on a fractional basis. I take on the next piece of manual work, then the next, at whatever cadence the company can absorb. Think of it as an AI operator you can point at a portco for a day or two a week instead of hiring a full-time head who has to learn the domain from zero. If the work isn't worth the ongoing spend, we stop.
I'd rather do good work at one company and get invited to the next one in the portfolio than sell a retainer nobody uses.
Why me
I have a Darden MBA and a background in enterprise finance, so I read a P&L and a month-end close the way your CFOs do. I know what a real reporting process looks like when it's working and when it's held together by one person and a fragile spreadsheet.
I also build this stuff myself and put the builds online. Every automation I'd run in a portco, I've recorded start to finish on the Rubicon AI channel, no edits hiding the parts that are hard. You can watch how the work goes before you let me near a company you own.
How to Automate a Weekly Report With Claude Code (No Coding)
Pull a week of data into Excel, wrap it in a button that refreshes on one double-click, then turn it into a filterable dashboard. This is the shape of a portco's weekly ops report.
How I Automated My Dashboard to Update Itself Every Night (Part #2 of automating with Claude Code)
The follow-up: the same dashboard set to refresh itself overnight, so the number is waiting when the team logs in instead of getting rebuilt by hand every morning.
One real example
A multi-entity drivetrain-parts distributor runs its monthly reporting on a pipeline I built. The finance team used to build that report by hand off three exports. Now the pipeline does it and they just read the dashboard. That's the bar I want to hit inside a portco: take a recurring, manual process and turn it into something the team stops thinking about.
Point me at one portfolio company
Send me the one where someone's rebuilding the same report by hand every week, or where month-end always runs late. A short call, and I'll tell you straight whether there's a first project worth doing.