Automate the work. Keep the control.
When Cafe9’s founder started this work nearly thirty years ago, it took teams of programmers and six-figure software and server packages — so only big companies got it. AI changed the math. Now the same enterprise-grade automation fits a small business: phones answered by AI, inboxes that triage themselves, books that reconcile overnight. Shipped in weeks, monitored forever.
AI is the cheapest employee you’ll ever train — if it’s built right.
Returns like these don’t come from buying tools — they come from implementation. Cafe9’s founder has been doing this work for nearly thirty years. When he started, it often took a team of programmers to accomplish what he now delivers in a week, on a budget that makes sense for a small business.
Built for what your business actually needs.
Every engagement is built on systems we’ve already shipped for working businesses — not experiments on your dime.
AI voice & chat agents
A phone agent that answers 24/7 in a voice customers like — quotes your prices, screens the calls you don’t want, and emails you structured lead data after every conversation.
The unified inbox
Email, texts, WhatsApp, and call transcripts in one screen for your whole team — with AI that drafts replies, translates on the fly, and summarizes hour-long calls into five lines.
Back-office automation
Payments matched to invoices automatically — even when customers split one bill across three Venmo payments. Reconciliation that took days happens overnight.
Systems that talk to each other
ERP, CRM, booking platforms, calendars, payment processors — wired together with watchdogs that tell you the moment anything drifts out of sync.
AI strategy & fractional CTO
A working operator’s roadmap: what to automate first, what to buy instead of build, and what to skip entirely. Then we build it with you.
Monitoring & support
Everything we ship comes with monitoring, alerting, and a human who answers. Automation you can’t trust is worse than none.
Real businesses. Real systems. Real numbers.
A few recent engagements. Names withheld — their competitors read websites too.
One inbox for every conversation
Email, SMS, WhatsApp, and phone-call transcripts unified into a single AI-assisted workspace. The team answers from one screen, sees who sent what, gets AI-drafted replies and English↔Spanish translation, and hour-long client calls arrive pre-summarized. Client threads run past 2,500 messages without anyone losing the plot.
Payments that match themselves
Hundreds of monthly Venmo, Zelle, and card payments matched to open invoices automatically — including customers who split one invoice across several transfers to dodge per-day app limits. Every unmatched dollar surfaces with a reason instead of disappearing into a spreadsheet.
An AI receptionist that earns its keep
A natural-voice phone agent answers the main line around the clock: explains the service, quotes exact pricing, politely screens callers the business doesn’t serve, and emails a structured lead card — name, number, property, reason — after every call.
Watchdogs on every calendar
Overlapping reservations across Airbnb, VRBO, and direct bookings detected and flagged daily — with a second watchdog checking that the sync itself never silently dies. Conflicts get caught while they’re still an email, not a guest standing in a doorway.
Clients who onboard themselves
A self-service portal walks new clients through account, properties, and booking-calendar setup — validating everything and writing straight into the company’s systems of record. Staff stopped re-typing intake forms; owners sign up at 10pm from the mainland.
An ERP sized for a small business
Open-source ERP deployed and tailored — invoicing, HR, scheduling, and customer records in one place, integrated with the tools the crew already used. Enterprise capability at a small-business price: the license bill is zero.
Tom Sinclair, MBA
Tom started in Air Force intelligence, where fast and right had to be the same thing. Civilian life took him into finance, and at Wells Fargo he found the work that became his career: finding inefficient processes and automating them. That passion carried him from financial analyst to a crucial part of the bank’s reporting to senior executives and the board of directors — Vice President of Business Intelligence & Analytics within 18 months. When a major merger was projected to need ten times the reporting staff, his automation absorbed the whole load — same team, no new hires — and cut key reporting cycles by 80%.
He has spent the two decades since doing the same work for companies without a Fortune-500 budget. He rebuilt a bank’s reporting in six weeks — on a project scoped at six months — for a quarter of the budget. He turned a pharma report that took a PhD a full week into an afternoon’s review. And he knows the owner’s seat: he bought a five-person cleaning company and grew its client base five times over while barely doubling staff. When the 2023 Lahaina wildfire took his own home, the systems kept the business running. It never missed a job.
MBA (University of Oregon) · Machine Learning (Stanford/DeepLearning.AI) · AI for Business (Wharton) · Executive Data Science (Johns Hopkins) · English/Spanish. Based in Valencia, Spain, working with clients across Europe, Hawaiʻi, the U.S. mainland, and Latin America. Old colleagues sometimes call him by his middle name — Brad.
Two decades of people willing to put it in writing.
From LinkedIn, trimmed for length.
One of the most creative people I have ever met. As a manager he was also great at finding and retaining talent — many of those he hired are still with the company 15 years later. One of the top 5 managers I have ever reported to.
A man of integrity. He does what he says he will do, and he delivers. If you are looking for someone who can solve any logistics or staffing puzzle, you need go no further.
A quick study and a self-starter, always eager for challenges. His personal integrity has earned him the respect of many managers at Wells Fargo.
An ingenious and forward-thinking entrepreneur. Always thinking of the needs of the market, he has started successful companies in several areas — and he invests in the training of his people.
From first conversation to running system.
Listen
A free consult. You talk, we listen, and you leave with an honest read on what AI can — and can’t — do for your business.
Prototype
A working slice of the real thing in weeks, running on your actual data. You judge results, not slideware.
Ship
We harden it, train your team, and put it in production — with monitoring and alerts from day one.
Keep it running
Watchdogs, updates, and a human who answers when something feels off. Systems age; ours get tended.
Notes from the workbench.
Plain-language pieces for owners who’d rather run their business than study AI.
Your missed calls are a revenue report
What an after-hours phone log says about the money a small business leaves on the table — and what a $200/month AI receptionist recovers.
What separates AI that pays from AI that doesn’t
The businesses seeing 3.7x returns share three habits — and none of them are picking a better chatbot.
Books that balance themselves
Venmo limits, split payments, and the reconciliation trick that turns three days of bookkeeping into twenty minutes.
One inbox to rule a twelve-person team
How a property-services company merged email, texts, WhatsApp, and calls into a single screen — and what changed in week one.
Buy, build, or skip: the AI tool aisle
An operator’s rubric for the five AI tools the average small business now runs — and the subscriptions you can cancel.
The 6.8-hour week you get back
Where automation actually returns owner time first — it’s not where the demos say — and how to spend the surplus.
Tell us what’s eating your week. We’ll show you the system that fixes it.
Thirty minutes, no obligation, no jargon. If we can’t help, we’ll say so — and usually point you somewhere that can. Working from Valencia, Spain with clients across Europe, Hawaiʻi, the U.S. mainland, and Latin America.
tom@cafe9.ai