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PHASE 03 · ONGOING · MONTHLY

The Retainer.

The build, running and tuned, in your boardroom every month.

Where the operation actually lives. Once the install is live, the same tiger team that built it stays on retainer to run it, tune it, defend it, and expand it. Build-and-bounce is what other firms do. We don't.

WHAT THIS PHASE PRODUCES

Deliverables.

  • Monthly KPI review on every workflow in scope
  • Quarterly business review with executive sponsor
  • Vendor management across the AI stack
  • Governance updates as models, regulations, and data perimeter evolve
  • Incremental builds as new workflows enter scope
  • Tiger Team on call during business hours for incidents
STEP BY STEP

How the the retainer actually runs.

EVERY WEEK

Operational watch

We watch the KPI dashboard daily. Anomalies (latency, refusal rate, agent error rate, conversion drops) get caught before you'd have noticed. Most weeks pass without incident — the goal is for nothing to surprise you.

MONTH 1+

Monthly KPI review

60-min review with operational leads. Every workflow in scope, its current KPI vs. baseline, and any tuning we did or recommend. We don't ship slide decks; you get a one-pager.

QUARTER 1+

Quarterly business review (QBR)

90-min review with the executive sponsor. Strategic posture: what's working, what's changing in the AI landscape that affects your operation, what new workflows are candidates for the next Install expansion. We're operator-to-operator here, not vendor-to-customer.

AS NEEDED

Vendor management

When OpenAI ships a new model, when Anthropic changes pricing, when a vertical SaaS adds AI features that overlap with our agents — we evaluate, recommend, and execute the change. You don't have to track this.

AS NEEDED

Incremental builds

Workflows you didn't include in the original Install can be added later — typically scoped as 2–4 week mini-Installs inside the retainer envelope, or as new Beachhead Builds depending on size.

INCIDENTS

Tiger Team on call

Business hours pager. If an agent goes off the rails — wrong answer, customer complaint, regulatory question — we're on it within an hour. Severity-1 incidents get a written post-mortem.

SAMPLE ARTIFACTS

What you get on paper.

ANONYMIZED, REAL-LOOKING. ENGAGEMENT-SPECIFIC ARTIFACTS LIVE IN CLIENT NDA.

Monthly KPI one-pager

Every workflow's current KPI vs. baseline, tuning notes, and what we recommend next. Shared in Notion.

QBR deck (90 min)

Strategic-posture review. Not a slide-show; an operator conversation with a written summary.

Vendor stack changelog

Every model swap, every pricing change, every new vendor evaluated and decided against. Hosted in Notion.

Incident post-mortems

For any Sev-1 event. Public to your team, retained for governance audit.

Annual security review

Once a year, formal walk-through of your data perimeter, audit logs, and model-routing posture. Defendable in a regulatory exam.

TOOLS & FRAMEWORKS WE USE

Inside this phase.

Toolchain selected per-engagement. This is the typical stack.

  • PagerDuty (severity routing)
  • Notion (deliverable layer)
  • Sentry / Datadog (observability)
  • OpsCheck cadence
  • Vendor Stack Rationalization Framework
WHAT THE CLIENT DOES

Your team's role during this phase.

  • Operational leads: 60 min/month for the KPI review.
  • Executive sponsor: 90 min/quarter for the QBR.
  • IT lead: 60 min/year for the security review (more if regulated).
  • On Sev-1 incidents: as much of your team as needed, on our coordination.
  • Outside of those touch-points, the system runs itself. Owner-optional by design.
WHAT WE HAND OFF AT THE END

The exit.

The Retainer is open-ended by default. 12-month initial term. Adjusts annually with expansion scope. Cancellable with 60 days' notice after year one. Most clients don't cancel — they expand. The whole point of the install is that the operation now runs without you having to think about it, and most operators discover they want the next domain installed instead of going back to running it manually.

Book an Ops Call.

30 minutes. Operator-to-operator. No deck. No follow-up nurture sequence designed to wear you down.

Book an Ops Call →