Founding engagement
How we earn an engagement.
The work that goes in before signing.
The client
A privately held trucking company with a driver-recruiting bottleneck.
Qualified drivers are hard to find. When they call or apply, the company has a narrow window before they look elsewhere. That window was getting missed.
The engagement: design and ship an AI-driven recruiting workflow. Fixed fee. Eight-week baseline.
The work product
How an engagement gets designed.
The diagnostic
A funnel analysis of every inbound recruiting channel. Mapped where leads were being lost and what each leak cost. Benchmarked against industry capture rates.
The architecture pivot
The original architecture proposed a custom voice-AI integration built directly against the carrier's applicant tracking system. After weeks of vendor outreach in the voice and text AI recruiting space, plus integration analysis with the ATS itself, the architecture pivoted. We replaced the custom build with a vendor-led voice + text omnichannel platform using the ATS's productized inbound surfaces as a redundancy stack.
Production reliability now sits with a vendor that already has trucking deployments at carriers this size. We own architecture and operating support. The vendor owns the integration. The integration uses the ATS's existing productized surfaces — no partner-approval dependency, no exposure to the ATS vendor's roadmap. That decision changed the engagement's risk profile, and the client could see the reasoning before signing.
Commercial structure
How we engage depends on the client. We have several commercial structures — retainer, shared-risk, fixed-fee — and the right fit depends on how the client wants to buy and how measurable the use case is.
This engagement landed on fixed-fee. The buyer wanted speed and certainty. Outcomes depended on factors partly outside our control, so attaching our fee to those outcomes would have created measurement disputes. Fixed-fee gives the buyer one number, locked at signature.
Where to read next.
The maturity model is the broader read on where your business sits today. The fit scorer is a two-minute self-check. Or email us directly.