AI & Systems Consulting

Put AI to work in your business — without the jargon.

I'm a finance-trained operator who finds the one expensive, annoying workflow in your business and turns it into a reliable system — usually starting with something that's quietly eating 5–10 hours a week. Practical, measured, and yours to keep.

Book a free 30-min consult See how it works
  • Finance-trained, AI-fluent
  • Plain-English, no hype
  • You own everything we build
Finance-trained · AI-fluent
  • Vanderbilt UniversityM.S., Finance
  • University of South FloridaB.S., Finance
  • Corporate Finance InstituteAI in Finance — Certified

Built for small businesses — not the enterprise

  • Clinics & practices
  • Law & accounting firms
  • Agencies & studios
  • Home & trade services
  • E-commerce & retail
  • Real estate

Start where you are

Route 01 “I'm drowning in busywork”

See the eight workflows AI quietly takes off a small team's plate first.

Jump to the workflows Route 02 “Curious, but skeptical”

Good — skeptics make the best clients. Start with the no-pressure version.

Start gently Route 03 “Show me the numbers”

A finance-grade, deliberately conservative look at what you'd get back.

Try the ROI calculator

Why now

Chatbots were the demo. Workflow automation is the payoff.

When ChatGPT launched, AI could hold a conversation. A few short years later, it can read your documents, use your tools, and run real work end to end. That's the line we just crossed — and it's where the hours and dollars actually come back.

Then · 2022

You chatted with it

  • Ask a question, get an answer
  • Copy-paste between a dozen tabs
  • Clever — but it couldn't touch your tools
  • The work still landed on you
Now

It does the work

  • Reads your documents and data
  • Takes actions across your tools
  • Runs entire workflows end to end
  • Hands you back the hours

The technology crossed a line: AI went from a clever assistant to a capable operator. For a small business, that's the difference between a fun demo and real hours back every week — and putting that shift to work, safely and on your terms, is exactly what I do.

Just curious about AI?

You don't need an AI strategy. You need one annoying process fixed.

You don't have to understand the technology, know the tools, or have anything figured out. If there's a task that quietly drives you nuts every week — that's the perfect place to begin. Finding the rest is my job, not yours.

Start a no-pressure conversation Or grab the free AI-opportunity checklist
  • No homeworkYou don't need to learn a tool or read up beforehand.
  • No jargonI explain everything in plain English, at a pace that feels good.
  • No dumb questions"Wait — can AI even do that?" is exactly the right place to start.
  • No pressureIt's a relaxed conversation, not a pitch. If AI won't help, I'll tell you.

What I do

Four ways I help you get real results from AI

Most engagements start with one and grow from there. Everything is scoped up front, so you always know exactly what you're getting.

01

AI workflow automation

The repetitive stuff — data entry, invoicing, follow-ups, scheduling, document handling — handled automatically so your team spends time on work that matters.

  • Inbox triage & reply drafting
  • Invoice, quote & document processing
  • Lead routing & reminders
02

Custom AI tools & chatbots

Assistants trained on your business — your docs, your policies, your tone. For your customers, or for your team behind the scenes.

  • Customer support & FAQ assistants
  • Internal "ask anything" knowledge search
  • Quoting & intake copilots
03

Systems & integrations

Your CRM, accounting, scheduling, and email finally talking to each other — so information flows on its own and nothing falls through the cracks.

  • Connect the tools you already pay for
  • One source of truth for your data
  • Reliable, monitored automations
04

AI strategy & training

A clear-eyed look at where AI actually pays off for you — backed by a finance mindset for ROI — plus hands-on training so your team uses it confidently and safely.

  • Opportunity audit & roadmap
  • Tool selection & policy
  • Live team workshops

Where AI pays off first

Recognize any of these?

Most engagements start by quietly taking one of these off your plate. If two or three feel painfully familiar, that's exactly where we'd begin.

Invoice & bill intakeRead, logged to your books, flagged if anything's off.
Lead capture & follow-upEvery inquiry answered fast — nothing slips through.
Quotes & proposalsA solid first draft in minutes, not hours.
Customer email triageSorted, prioritized, with replies drafted for you.
Document data extractionPull the numbers out of forms and PDFs automatically.
Scheduling & remindersBookings, confirmations and no-show nudges on autopilot.
CRM cleanup & data entryRecords stay current without the manual slog.
"Ask anything" searchYour team finds answers in your own docs instantly.

Don't see yours? It's probably a fit too — bring it to the call.

How it works

A calm, five-step path to your first win

No giant "digital transformation." We find one painful, expensive process, fix it, prove the value — then expand from there.

  1. 1

    Discover

    A free consult and a short audit of how work actually moves through your business. We find where time and money leak.

    ~1 week
  2. 2

    Map

    You get a plain-English roadmap: the highest-leverage opportunities, ranked by effort and payoff, with an honest read on the ROI.

    scoped & quoted
  3. 3

    Build

    We start with one well-scoped pilot. I build it, test it on real data, and keep you in the loop the whole way — no black boxes.

    2–4 weeks
  4. 4

    Train

    Your team learns the new workflow with documentation made for humans. AI should feel like a relief, not another thing to learn.

    hands-on
  5. 5

    Support

    I keep things running and look for the next win. Stay on month-to-month, or take the keys and run it yourself. Your call.

    optional

In practice

From a flood of listings to the five deals worth a call

A real engagement with a real-estate investor who runs rentals and flips houses — the kind of high-volume, numbers-heavy decision-making where AI earns its keep.

The challenge

He was drowning in deal flow — MLS alerts, wholesaler blasts, and off-market leads — underwriting each one by hand. Good deals slipped away while he chewed through the backlog.

What I built

An AI deal-screening pipeline: it ingests every incoming property, runs the numbers against his buy-box for both rentals and flips, and ranks them. The first thing he sees each morning is a shortlist — not an inbox.

Before
  • ~150 listings reviewed by hand
  • Good deals buried in the inbox
  • ~20 minutes to underwrite each
  • Spreadsheet grind, every day
After
  • Ranked automatically, every morning
  • Top 5 surfaced daily
  • ~1 minute per deal
  • Buy-box logic, math attached
Want something like this?

Who's behind Northpath

Finance-trained, AI-obsessed — and on your side of the table.

Hi, I'm Matt. I'm the person you'll actually work with — not a sales rep, not an offshore team.

I came up through finance: a B.S. in Finance from the University of South Florida and an M.S. in Finance from Vanderbilt University. So I read a P&L before I touch a workflow. I care about what actually moves your numbers — not shipping AI for its own sake.

That training came with real reps. Through Vanderbilt's Summer Accelerator I worked on live strategy-consulting projects for organizations like Dollar General, Nashville Superspeedway, and Nissan — briefing real stakeholders on real business problems. The same rigor now goes into every small-business engagement.

For the last few years I've gone deep on applied AI: building with the frontier models, automating real back-office work, and earning the Corporate Finance Institute's AI in Finance certification along the way. These aren't tools I read about — they're tools I use every day to get real work done.

When we work together, you get someone who speaks both languages: the business side that worries about ROI and risk, and the technical side that knows which model, which integration, and which guardrails actually fit a small business.

Let's talk it through
Consulting experience Strategy projects through Vanderbilt's Summer Accelerator
  • Dollar General
  • Nashville Superspeedway
  • Nissan

A note from Matt

Let me be straight with you

Because a lot of people in my line of work won't be. Small businesses get burned constantly — by agencies that overpromise and vanish, by "experts" who hide behind jargon and lock you into long contracts, and lately by a wave of overnight "AI gurus" selling hype.

I've spent years around small businesses, and I kept noticing the same thing: AI could genuinely help them — real hours saved, real money back — but there was a knowledge gap, and no one they actually trusted to walk them across it.

That's why Northpath exists. No hype, no lock-in, no jargon you have to pretend to follow. I'll show you plainly what AI can and can't do for your business, prove it on something small before you commit real money, and hand you everything I build — so you're never stuck depending on me.

And if AI isn't the right answer for you, I'll tell you. That honesty is the entire point — it's exactly the part the shady operators leave out.

— Matt

The toolkit

I pick the boring tool that works — not the shiny one that demos well

I'm fluent across the major platforms and stay current as they ship, but I'm not loyal to any of them. Whatever quietly does the job for your business is the right call.

AIOpenAI AAnthropic GGoogle Gemini PPerplexity CpMicrosoft Copilot { }Claude Code CxOpenAI Codex CoClaude Cowork OSOpen-source LLMs OROpenRouter AbAbacus.AI 11ElevenLabs RRecraft AI

How good implementation works

The tools are the easy part

Anyone can buy a subscription. Good implementation means bringing your data and honest research to the table, understanding how your business actually runs, and integrating that knowledge into solutions built around you. The tools are commodities — the understanding is the edge. And the hard part is knowing what shouldn't be automated.

The right tools Frontier models, open-source, and the rest of the toolkit — the commodity part.
Your data & real research Grounded in what's actually true about your market and your numbers — not guesswork.
How your business really works The context most implementations skip — and the reason solutions actually fit.
Solutions that power your business Built around how you actually work — not bolted on.

Data & trust

Your sensitive data, handled like it's mine

Client records, financials, proprietary processes — the data you can't afford to leak. Here's how I keep it protected, and yours.

You own the keys

Everything runs on accounts and credentials you control. I don't train public models on your data, and I switch off data-sharing wherever the tools allow.

Private by design

For proprietary or sensitive information, I can run open-source models inside your own environment — so your data never leaves your walls.

Built around your rules

NDAs, least-privilege access, and clear data boundaries agreed up front. For regulated data — health, financial, or otherwise — I design to your requirements and work alongside your compliance advisors.

Straight talk: I'm a consultant, not a law firm or a certifying body — so I won't claim a compliance stamp I can't back. What I will do is build to your standards and stay transparent about exactly where your data lives and how it flows.

Ways to work together

Start small. Scale when it's earned.

Most people start with a fixed-fee pilot built around a single workflow — clear scope, clear deliverables, agreed before any work begins. The free consult sorts out which of these fits in 30 minutes.

Best first step

Audit & Roadmap

Perfect if you're curious but not sure where to start. You walk away with a plan you could hand to anyone.

  • Deep-dive into your workflows
  • Ranked opportunity roadmap
  • Tool & cost recommendations
  • 90-minute findings walkthrough
Start here
Most popular

Automation Sprint

We pick one high-value process and ship a working solution — built, tested, and handed over with training.

  • Everything in Audit & Roadmap
  • One workflow or AI tool, built end-to-end
  • Integrated with your existing tools
  • Team training & documentation
  • 30 days of post-launch support
Book a consult
Ongoing

Fractional AI Partner

For businesses ready to keep improving. A steady hand to build, maintain, and advise — month to month.

  • Continuous automation & tooling
  • Monitoring & upkeep
  • Priority support & advice
  • Cancel anytime
Let's talk

Pilots are quoted as a single fixed fee in writing before any work begins — so you know the number, and you'll never be surprised by an invoice.

How engagements work

Structured so the risk stays on me

Real deliverables, paid in stages as the value lands. You're never writing a blank check and hoping — at every step you know what's coming and what it's worth.

Clear deliverables, in writing

Every engagement is broken into milestones, each ending in something concrete you can see and use — not vague "consulting hours."

Pay in stages, as value lands

Billing is tied to those milestones, not a big sum up front. You fund the next step once the last one has proven out.

Never locked in

Engagements pause cleanly between phases. If your priorities shift, you can step off at a natural break — no year-long contract holding you hostage.

Accountability, not fine print

If a milestone ever misses the mark, I'd rather fix it — or settle up fairly for the work that landed — than keep money I didn't earn.

To be clear: none of this is me planning for you to be unhappy — it's the opposite. Taking the risk off your plate is how I earn the trust to keep going. Most engagements grow because the first one paid for itself.

What good looks like

See what you could get back

Drag the sliders to your reality. It's a rough, deliberately conservative estimate — your real numbers come from measuring your actual workflows.

10 hrs
$35

I assume automation reclaims about two-thirds of the time you spend on a task — not all of it. Honest beats impressive.

A realistic recovery
28hours back / month
$11,800recovered / year

That's roughly three days back, every month.

See where those hours are hiding →

Good questions

The things people ask first

Still wondering about something? Bring it to the call — no question is too basic.

Do I need to be technical to work with you?

Not at all. My whole job is to handle the technical part and explain things in plain English. If you can describe how your business runs, we can find ways to make it run smoother.

How do you charge?

Every engagement is custom-scoped, because no two small businesses are the same. After the free consult I'll quote the work in writing — a fixed fee for projects, or a simple monthly rate for ongoing help. No packages, no surprises, and you approve the number before anything starts.

Is my business too small for this?

Small is exactly who this is for. A solo practice or a 20-person shop often sees the biggest relief, because a few hours saved each week makes a real difference. We scope everything to fit your size and budget.

What about my data and privacy?

Your data stays yours. I choose tools and settings that keep your information private and avoid training public models on it. We'll agree on exactly what's connected and what isn't before anything goes live.

Why does a finance background matter for AI?

Because the goal isn't "cool AI" — it's a better business. A finance lens means I evaluate every idea on real return: what it costs, what it saves, and how quickly it pays back. You get technology decisions made like investment decisions.

What if it breaks, or you stop working with me?

Everything is built on accounts you own, with documentation you keep. If we part ways, it all keeps running and any other developer can pick it up. No lock-in, and nothing held hostage.

Let's find your first win

Book a free 30-minute consult

No slides, no jargon — just a straight conversation about where AI could save you time and money. Worst case, you leave with a few free ideas.

Grab a time

Or send a message

Free 30-min consult No pitch — just useful
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