I’m Jake. I built and ran a 35-person financial services firm. We went from drowning in operational work to me running the business from my phone in 40-hour-shorter weeks. Same firm, same revenue, completely different life.
The Independence Stack is the system I installed in my own company first — against my own payroll, with my own clients on the line. It wasn’t a framework I picked up at a conference. It’s what I had to build to stop the business from depending on me.
What I learned: every $2M+ service business breaks in the same shape. The owner is the bottleneck. The team can’t move without checking in. The CRM is half-trusted. The knowledge lives in one head. The morning is meetings, the afternoon is firefighting.
Big enterprises solved this with seven-figure ops teams and custom software. AI is the engineer that makes the same systems affordable for businesses your size. That’s the entire premise of Jaze.
I installed it in my firm. Now I install it in others.
The personal touch — your relationships, your craft, your judgment, the way you do the work — is the backbone of your business. AI can’t replicate that. We don’t want it to.
A lot of operators are nervous about AI for exactly this reason. They’ve been pitched on AI as replacement and it doesn’t feel right. They’re correct.
The stack handles the boring parts so you can spend more time on the parts only you can do. That’s the entire pitch. AI is the engineer that makes it affordable. You’re still the business.
We’re based in Bend. The earliest installs have been for service businesses in Oregon — financial services, contractors, homebuilders, med spas. The local context matters: the people running these businesses are the people we already know.
The Independence Stack works anywhere. As we productize the install, the geography stops mattering. If you’re running a $2M+ service business and want to see what’s possible, the diagnostic is the same whether you’re in Bend or Boise.
I write about what I’m actually building inside service businesses — the wins, the failures, the unfinished experiments. The goal is to make the bar for “systems for SMB” concrete, not aspirational.
If you want to see what AI can actually do inside a real business, follow along on LinkedIn or read the blog.
Field notes on systems, the AI Chief of Staff, and what’s actually working inside real service businesses.
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Read moreFree 30-minute diagnostic call. You walk away with a clear written assessment of which component to install first — even if you don’t hire us.