Advisory
What I do
I start by watching how the work happens: which spreadsheet everyone secretly trusts more than the official system, and why. That's the assessment. Half of what looks broken isn't. It just never got explained to anyone after the person who set it up left.
Then I build. Margin, the firm I founded in 2024, is where that work lives: AI and automation designed for county auditor and city clerk offices, nonprofits, and family firms, the kind of organizations that run on institutional memory and can't afford to gamble on a vendor's demo. I write the code myself and ship it to production myself.
The harder part comes after launch. In 2026 I took a technology seat inside a farm management company founded in 1930, as the person who has to live with what I built and keep the people around me using it. Adoption is a leadership problem, and the person who built the thing should be the one sitting with whoever would rather keep the old way.
Recent work
The clients stay unnamed here. Each of these is a place that runs on one or two people who carry most of it in their heads.
- April 2026
- A city clerk-treasurer's office went live on a desk that answers out of its own ordinances and files and shows where each answer came from. The clerk-treasurer had never used AI, and has since run a contract review and an RFQ through it in one working day.
- June 2026
- Sixteen tracts of Ohio farmland sold at live auction on a board I built, the first sale run on it, with the old spreadsheet open beside it as the check. Bid combinations that used to take two or three minutes resolved in seconds on every screen in the hall.
- August 2026
- The farm management firm behind that auction had its assistant invent a farmland sale, then tell the appraiser who caught it that it hadn't searched. The log showed it had. I shipped a gate the same day that won't pass a claim it can't trace to a source.
Who it's for
The organizations I work best with are small and old. Think of a county auditor's office two people deep in levy season, with a settlement deadline that doesn't move. Margin already serves that office, and a few more like it. They need what technology can do for them right now, delivered plainly and explained in terms that make sense to the people who'll use it.
How it starts
Email me and tell me what's actually going on. I'll tell you plainly whether this is a fit before either of us spends real time on it. If it is, we start there: get in touch.
Here from my resume? The engineering side, with the resume itself, is at shanewaters.com/work/resume-plain.