For owner-operators · Washington DC metro
200 emails a day.
10 actually need you.
If you spend the first hour of every day deleting, archiving, and forwarding email — and end the day having never gotten to the ten messages that actually mattered — you're doing the job a chief of staff would do, except you're also supposed to be running the business. I build inbox-triage systems that read every incoming email, surface what needs you, draft responses to what doesn't, and route the rest where it belongs.
41 emails came in overnight.
Needs you · 3
Alvarez wants the quote by Friday
Bay Supply invoice — 12 days overdue
New lead: roof replacement, Severna Park
FYI · 12
filed, no action
Archived · 26
newsletters, receipts
Three decisions instead of forty-one. Waiting in your inbox by 7am.
The 200/10 problem
You can't hire a chief of staff. You also can't keep doing this yourself.
Run a 10–30 person business and your inbox becomes the universal funnel: vendor invoices, client questions, employee CCs, sales pitches, calendar requests, things your team forwarded "for visibility." Two hundred a day, three hundred on a bad one.
Ten of them genuinely need your judgment. The rest are noise, or they should have been routed somewhere else, or they have a draft answer your assistant could send if you had one. But you don't, because you're a 14-person company and a chief of staff costs $150k.
So you do it yourself, badly, and the ten messages that mattered are the ones that don't get answered.
What I build
Three folders, one rule: nothing reaches you until it's been sorted.
Needs you
A short list of the messages that genuinely require your judgment. Annotated with one-line context and any relevant history. This is the inbox you check.
Drafted
Replies the system drafted on your behalf — scheduling, FAQ-shaped questions, vendor confirmations. You skim, approve, send. Or edit first if it matters.
Routed
Messages that should have gone to your ops lead, your bookkeeper, your office manager. Forwarded with context, marked read on your end. You see a digest, not the noise.
The triage runs continuously in the background. By the time you open your laptop, the morning's email has already been sorted into those three buckets. You read 20 messages instead of 200, and the ones you read are the ones that matter.
What this isn't
Not auto-replies that embarrass you. Not a black box.
Nothing goes out under your name without you seeing it. The drafted folder is a draft folder — every reply waits for a one-click approval. If you don't trust a draft, the system writes a different one or escalates the message to "needs you."
And the categorization rules are visible. If something gets routed to your ops lead that should have stayed with you, you fix it once and the system learns. No mystery, no opaque AI judgments — just rules you can see and adjust.
Works with
Gmail or Outlook. That's it.
If your business runs on Google Workspace or Microsoft 365, the triage system slots in without changing anything you or your team see day-to-day. No new app to learn, no inbox migration, no "now check this other thing too." It uses the same labels and folders you already have.
Pricing fits the homepage's $500–$1,500 range depending on volume and how many routing rules your business needs. The pilot is one week — we run it on your actual inbox, you watch it work for a few days, then we tune until it's right.
Other problems I solve
Insurance agencies
Reach the whole book before renewals lapse.
Read more →Accounting and bookkeeping firms
Stop chasing W-2s every January.
Read more →Home services and trades
The job's done at 4. The write-up's done at 7.
Read more →Home services, dental, auto repair
Your happy customers never say so publicly.
Read more →Law, financial, event vendors
The first call is the same twelve questions.
Read more →Ready?
Want your morning back?
Fifteen minutes is enough to look at the shape of your inbox and figure out what triage would actually save you. If the answer is 'not enough to be worth it,' I'll say so.