02 · Advisory sprints & implementation

Practical operations consulting & production AI

Every engagement is anchored to concrete operating metrics: cycle time, intake accuracy, gross margin per employee and strict client-data confidentiality. A price marked from is the starting fee for the smallest form of that service, and the fixed fee is agreed in writing before any work begins.

A whiteboard covered in handwritten sticky notes under the headings Brain Dump and Prioritize, with a hand placing one card on the value grid. — A prioritisation board part-way through an audit workshop, with candidate workflows sorted by hours recoverable against build effort.

Advisory and build services

S-01

Operational workflow & AI readiness audit

$2,400

Before you spend tens of thousands on software seats or custom builds, the firm shadows key workflows across sales intake, estimating and proposals, service delivery and back-office admin. You receive a candid executive dossier scoring your top 8 to 12 bottleneck opportunities by weekly hours recoverable, technical complexity, data-privacy risk and exact build cost, clearly separating simple API quick wins from true AI use cases.

Best for a leadership team with several automation ideas and no clear order to take them in.

Usual timing a two-week diagnostic sprint.

Included

Cross-department bottleneck mapping and a data security review
Deterministic-versus-AI ROI scoring and a ranked 90-day roadmap

Not included building or buying any tool. The roadmap is vendor-neutral and can be taken to any provider.

S-02

Custom workflow & AI automation buildout

from $4,500

Reliable operational pipelines designed, tested and deployed directly inside your own cloud environment, automating tasks such as multi-page RFP and PDF intake extraction, client onboarding packet verification, service ticket triage and CRM-to-proposal drafting. Every build includes confidence-score thresholds, mandatory human sign-off steps for client-facing outputs, audit logging and full documentation.

Best for a team re-typing the same documents into its CRM, ERP or inbox every day.

Usual timing a scoped flat-fee sprint of three to five weeks.

Included

Production integrations across your CRM, ERP, inbox and document intake
Structured extraction with confidence thresholds
Human approval gates and audit logging
Full documentation, handed over with the build

Not included software licence and subscription costs, which you pay to the provider directly and which are never marked up.

S-03

Team enablement & applied workshop

$1,850

Generic webinars do not change Monday-morning habits. Before the session, the firm samples real anonymised workflows from your operations, sales, project management or client-service teams. During an interactive half-day workshop staff practise live on structured exercises and leave with a custom playbook of tested prompt templates, red-flag verification checklists and formatting workflows.

Best for a team that has licences but has not changed how it works.

Usual timing one half-day live workshop.

Included

The workshop, built around your team’s real daily documents
Custom department playbooks and hallucination-check protocols

Not included build work on new tools, which is scoped and quoted separately if wanted.

A hand resting on a dark laptop keyboard in low light. — Late build work on a laptop. Every automation starts from the current process written down, because a pipeline is only as sound as the workflow behind it.

S-04

Private knowledge base & cited search (RAG)

from $5,200

Stop losing senior-staff hours answering the same internal policy, pricing or technical-spec questions in Slack or Teams. A permission-controlled retrieval system is deployed inside your private Azure, AWS or Google Workspace tenant. It answers staff questions using only your verified documents, cites the exact paragraph and file on every answer and never exposes company files to public model training.

Best for a firm whose senior people answer the same internal questions every day.

Usual timing set in the written scope for your private tenant deployment.

Included

An internal assistant drawing only on your SOPs, proposals, manuals and policies
Role-based document permissions
Clickable source-page citations on every answer

Not included cloud tenant subscription costs, which you pay to the provider directly.

S-05

AI governance & acceptable-use policy

$1,950

When employees paste client contracts, patient notes or financial spreadsheets into free consumer chatbots, a company takes on serious contractual and regulatory exposure. The firm audits shadow-AI use across your team, provisions commercial zero-retention workspaces, reviews vendor Data Processing Addendums (DPAs) and delivers a practical Acceptable-Use Policy your team will actually follow.

Best for a business where staff already use AI tools without written guardrails.

Usual timing agreed in the written scope before the shadow-AI audit begins.

Included

A shadow-AI audit and enterprise zero-retention setup
Vendor DPA review and PII redaction standards
A written Acceptable-Use Policy framework

Not included legal advice. The policy is an operating document, and your own attorney should review it before adoption.

S-06

Fractional operations & AI retainer

from $2,200 a month

Seasoned operational and technical guidance for leadership teams that do not want to hire a $220K full-time Head of Transformation. Twice a month the firm reviews KPI dashboards, refines deployed workflows as edge cases evolve, evaluates new vendor claims objectively and builds your next priority process improvement.

Best for a leadership team that wants senior guidance without a full-time hire.

Usual timing biweekly leadership and optimisation sprints, billed monthly.

Included

Vendor negotiation oversight and objective review of new tools
Automation accuracy monitoring and continuous process improvements
Training for new hires on deployed workflows

Not included interim management responsibility. No outcome is guaranteed; every result is measured against the agreed KPI baseline.

Engagement timeline

How a typical engagement runs, stage by stage

Day 1A 30-minute discovery call to map your largest manual bottlenecks.
Week 1Workflow shadowing across intake, delivery and back-office admin, plus a data security review.
Week 2The executive dossier: scored opportunities, exact build costs and a ranked 90-day roadmap.
Week 3The first build sprint begins inside your own cloud environment.
Week 5Testing against the measured baseline, with human approval gates in place.
Week 6Handover: documentation, staff training and full ownership of every workflow.

Timings are typical rather than promised. The written scope for each engagement carries its own dates, and any change to them is agreed in writing before it takes effect.

Reading the timeline

Not every service uses every row. The team workshop is a single half-day and the readiness audit finishes inside two weeks. The automation buildout and the private knowledge base run the full length, the governance policy follows its own audit-and-draft cycle, and the fractional retainer repeats in fortnightly sprints.

Most clients start with the audit, so that build money goes only to workflows with a measured return.

Side by side

Fees, timing and first steps compared

Each fee is fixed for its stated scope. A starting figure covers the smallest form of that service and is confirmed in writing before work begins.

The six services compared by starting price, usual timing and first step
Service	Starting price	Usual timing	First step
S-01 Workflow & AI readiness audit	$2,400	2 weeks	Name your top bottlenecks
S-02 Custom automation buildout	from $4,500	3–5 weeks	Name the documents and systems
S-03 Team enablement workshop	$1,850	half day	Share sample anonymised work
S-04 Private knowledge base (RAG)	from $5,200	set in the written scope	List the documents staff ask about
S-05 AI governance & use policy	$1,950	set in the written scope	Say which tools staff use now
S-06 Fractional operations retainer	from $2,200 a month	fortnightly sprints	Share your current KPIs

03 · Process

How contact works

01

Describe the bottleneck

Name the service and the manual process costing your team the most hours. The form asks for a name, an email address, an optional telephone number, the service and a message of at least twenty characters.

02

Receive a written reply

A reply arrives by email or telephone during office hours, Monday to Friday between 9:00 AM and 6:00 PM. It proposes a 30-minute discovery call and an honest view of whether automation is warranted.

03

Agree the fixed fee, then start

Work begins only after the scope and the figure are agreed in writing. A published price applies to its stated scope; anything beyond it is quoted before it starts.

04 · Suitability

Not sure whether to audit, build or train?

Many problems that look like AI projects are solved more cheaply with simple deterministic API integrations or better process design. Name the workflow and the team it affects, and the firm will say plainly which engagement fits, or whether no automation is warranted at all.

Ask which service fits

05 · Contact

Start with a discovery call

Thirty minutes to map your largest manual bottlenecks, with the scope and fixed fee confirmed in writing before anything begins.

Book Describe a workflow

Or write to hello@meridianloopadvisory.example and the firm replies Monday to Friday, 9:00 AM to 6:00 PM.