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AI operations consulting · Orange County
Est. 2026 · Founder-led
Armand Labs

The AI you
already own.

Whatever's been broken for years that nobody sells a fix for.
That's what we build.
Start a conversation → See what we build
Built inside
A $20M hospitality group
Six brands
Catering, venues, cafe
Shipped in 30 days
Not 90
01

Imagine if your company
actually worked like this.

You already own the software. You already pay for the seats. You just never had anyone to wire it together.

i.
Your entire business, searchable by a chat.
Every email, every contract, every client note, every invoice. One prompt: "What did we quote the Martinez job and where are we on their deposit?" Answer in two seconds, sourced from your own files.
ii.
Catch client issues in real time — before your team tells you.
Every inbound email, call transcript, and review is scanned as it arrives. A client goes quiet. A vendor fumbles a date. A refund gets mentioned. You know first. Not Monday.
iii.
A chatbot that answers every question with your company's actual knowledge.
Your SOPs, your playbooks, your contracts, your pricing. Staff asks. Client asks. New hire asks. The bot answers with what your company actually says — not what ChatGPT guesses.
iv.
Custom software for the one weird thing only your company does.
The thing no off-the-shelf tool gets right. The quirk in your workflow that makes every SaaS demo feel wrong. We build that tool. Small, specific, yours.
v.
Ask a question of any contract, lease, or SOP you've ever signed.
A document specialist trained on your legal library. "What's our auto-renewal exposure on the Irvine lease?" Answer, with the clause quoted back. No paralegal, no $600 call to counsel.
vi.
The problem you stopped bringing up — finally solved.
The specific thing only your business needs. The workflow nobody sells software for. The report your team has been begging for since 2022. That one. In a month.
That's the job.
02

The problem
you already know.

You're running a real business. And you're still doing half the work by hand.

You have a CRM. You have QuickBooks. You have email. You have 3–5 industry tools you pay for every month.

You're answering the same questions from your team all day. You're cross-checking systems at night. You're wondering if you missed a contract renewal. You're thinking about hiring someone just to handle the busywork — but you can't find anyone good, and you can't afford anyone great.

And there's a list of bigger problems you've stopped bringing up — not because they're unsolvable, but because nobody was ever going to build the specific thing your business needs.

You know AI is supposed to fix this. You just don't know where to start, what's possible, or who to trust.

This is what we fix. All of it.

03

Why this,
why us, why now.

Most AI consulting is built for tech startups and the Fortune 500. The startups build their own. The Fortune 500 hires McKinsey. You're neither.

You're a $5–30M business with a real P&L, real clients, real vendors, and real payroll. You've looked at the alternatives. None of them fit.

We're the missing category. A working COO of a $20M operation who builds. The rare combination that understands your P&L and ships the tools.

Every automation we sell is running in production at our own company. We're not selling transformation. We're selling the thing that already works.

Generic AI consultants
Have never run a business. They sell you ChatGPT Enterprise, a 90-day "transformation," and a deck. You still have the same problems.
Enterprise IT firms
Charge $500K for a 9-month engagement. You can't justify it. You can't wait.
Hiring a head of AI
You've been trying. The candidates who understand your business don't know AI. The ones who know AI don't understand your business. $150K + benefits is a hell of a bet on the wrong hire.
Doing it yourself
You don't have the time, the focus, or the stack. You know because you've tried twice.
And every week you don't have this, something leaks.
  • A deal sitting cold in someone's inbox.
  • A duplicate payment nobody caught.
  • A renewal ticking toward lapse.
  • A question your team is asking you for the fifth time this month.
  • A rep walking into a call without prep.
You already know the number. You've done the math on hiring. You know what another month costs. We take a small number of engagements per quarter. When they're booked, they're booked.
04

What we do.

We sit down with you. We learn your business.
Then we build whatever's been costing you time, money, or sleep — using the tools you already own, plus the thinnest layer of AI that makes them work.
Whatever it is. The 14 things on our deliverables page. The 3 things on yours that aren't. The specific thing your business does that no vendor will ever sell software for.
No rip-and-replace. No 90-day transformation deck. No $200K data scientist. Just the fix, shipped in 30 days, running on your stack.
This is the business you've always known you could run.
05

What we've already built.

Range proof. Fourteen of our most-shipped automations. Your actual problem probably isn't on this list — which is the point. If we've built this much across one hospitality group, whatever your business needs is already in reach.
01
Inbox triage
Auto-archive noise, surface real work.
02
AP reconciliation
Ramp × QBO (or equivalents) nightly cross-check.
03
Pipeline neglect detection
Flag stalled deals before they die.
04
Entity graph
Unified view of every person and vendor you've ever worked with.
05
Morning briefing
Daily digest with red flags, revenue, alerts.
06
Auto-intake
Forms, leads, invoices parsed into CRM automatically.
07
Document automation
DocuSign / PDF renaming, contract parsing.
08
Review monitoring
Google / Yelp / industry-specific alerts.
09
Renewal tracking
Insurance, licenses, leases, contracts surfaced 60/30/14/7/1 days out.
10
Company chatbot
Branded, trained on your SOPs, playbooks, pricing.
11
Document specialist
Chat with your contracts, leases, SOPs, policies.
12
Sales bible
Living doc of pricing, positioning, objection handling, competitive intel.
13
Outbound sequences
Personalized at scale, using your actual client data.
14
Rep intelligence briefings
Before every meeting: who they are, what they need.
Most clients pick 3–5 to start. We build what matters. The rest stays on the shelf.

Every business has three problems nobody sells a solution for — the specific workflow, the one integration, the report that has to be custom. Those are the ones we actually want.
06

How we're different.

Most consultants sell AI transformation. We sell AI discipline.
Most "AI Consultants"
Armand Labs
Sell ChatGPT Enterprise
→
Use what you own
Migrate you to new tools
→
Connect your existing stack
Hire a $200K data scientist for you
→
One operator + AI
"Transformation" language
→
"Here's a receipt" language
90-day engagements
→
30-day shipping
Retainers in the tens of thousands
→
$750–$2,000 / month
Never ran an operation
→
I was a COO
07

The receipts.

What changed inside the hospitality group after the system came online. Not hypotheticals. This is how the company actually runs now.

Whole team
Using the chatbot daily
SOPs, pricing, playbooks, policies. Nobody asks me what the deposit terms are anymore.
Deal alerts
Before they become issues
Quiet clients, missed replies, refund chatter. I hear about it before my team does.
Lease dates
Already on my calendar
Renewals, rent increases, insurance expirations. Surfaced 60/30/14/7/1 days out. Automatic.
Security audits
M365 tenant, monthly
Permissions, guest accounts, MFA gaps. Runs in the background. Report lands in my inbox.
Inbox
902 → 69
Unread emails before vs after. Same inbox, same week.
Duplicate payments
$8,400
Caught in six months. Nightly cross-check between the books and the cards.
The difference
Nothing falls through anymore
Not deals. Not renewals. Not vendor issues. Not security gaps. The system doesn't get tired, doesn't forget, doesn't take Fridays off. That's the part that pays for itself.
08

Who we are.

I'm AJ Barragan. Every automation we sell, I built for my own company first.

I'm the Chief Operating Officer of a family hospitality group in Orange County — catering, event venues, and a café — doing north of $20M a year across six brands. I've been running operations for more than a decade.

Everything Armand Labs offers, I built for our own company first. Not in theory. In production. Running right now.

I didn't learn this from a course or a book. I learned it fixing the same problems you're looking at.

If you've ever wondered why the information about a single client lives in five different places, none of which agree, we're going to get along.

09

How it works.

Week 1We talk.
30 minutes. We ask about your day, your tools, your team, what's broken. No deck. No pitch.
Week 2We learn your business.
We spend a few days in your systems (with your permission). We find the silent money-losers, the time sinks, and the gaps where your tools don't talk.
Week 3We pick the fights.
We come back with a ranked list of 10 things we could automate. You pick 3. We give you exact scope, timeline, and price.
Weeks 4–7We build.
Everything ships in 30 days. Running on your systems, documented for your team.
OngoingIt keeps running.
Low monthly retainer keeps everything healthy and adds new automations as your business grows.
10

Pricing.

Stack-agnostic. We work inside whatever you already have — HubSpot or Salesforce or Zoho; QBO or Xero or NetSuite. Pure retainer. No setup fees. First month is the heavy lift — audit, shipping, onboarding. Every month after is ongoing consulting, maintenance, and new work.
Starter
$3,500/ month · 3-mo min
Audit + 1 automation shipped in month one. Monthly: ongoing advisory, maintenance of what we built, one small improvement each month.
For "Show me what's possible."
Ops
$7,500/ month · 6-mo min
Audit + 3 automations in the first 30 days. Monthly: strategic AI-ops consulting, full maintenance, one new automation every 30–45 days.
For Most engagements.
Runway
$15,000/ month · 12-mo min
Full ops rebuild in the first 60 days — 6–10 automations, entity graph, morning briefing, sales bible, custom skills, all systems connected. Monthly: fractional AI-ops leadership, unlimited improvements, on-call for emergent needs. Includes the specific problem no vendor sells software for.
For Operators ready for real transformation.
One-time equipment + install · $2,500 Mac Mini, OpenClaw setup, secure install at your office or on your network. Pass-through hardware + labor. Required for 24/7 agent runtime. Skippable if your setup is fully cloud-based.
Not included AI provider token costs (Claude, OpenAI, etc.) — typically $50–$500 / month depending on usage. Passed through at cost, no markup.
Every engagement includes an escape clause after the minimum. If it's not working, we stop. No auto-renewals. No handcuffs.
11

Who this is for.

If any of these sound like you, we should talk.

If you're a tech startup, a Fortune 500, or pre-revenue, we're not your shop.
12

Tell us three things.

The three things your COO is doing manually every week. That's the conversation. We read everything. No sales call until we've swapped specifics.

1.
2.
3.
No sales call until we've swapped specifics. We reply within 48 hours — usually the same day.
Thanks. We'll read every word and reply within 48 hours.