The machine drafts.
A person signs.

Findings, before promises.

Hearth Advisory is a small firm with a narrow claim: the highest-value AI work in traditional industry is not chat, and it is not magic. It is the patient conversion of manual paperwork — tickets, memos, rescreens, invoices — into systems that draft well and defer properly. We audit one workflow, build the system, and hand it over. These are the conditions under which we are usually hired:

1. 01Credit reviews assembled by hand from PDFs, spreadsheets, and email threads.cost: evenings
2. 02Field tickets keyed twice — once in the field, again in accounting.cost: Fridays
3. 03Portfolio rescreening done annually, because it takes a quarter.cost: surprises
4. 04A website neither buyers nor AI answer engines can actually parse.cost: invisibility

One workflow, run in front of you.

We do not publish invented case studies, so our proof is drafted live. Below, a synthetic field ticket is read, checked, and turned into a draft credit note — then the system does the most important thing it knows how to do: it stops.

FIELD TICKET  #FT-4471
OPERATOR   Ridgeline Services LLC
LEASE      Barrow Creek 22-4H
DATE       07/12/2026
WORK       wireline unit, 11.5 hrs @ $410/hr
MATERIALS  lubricator rental, 2 dy @ $180
APPROVED   R. Mendez  (field supv.)
TOTAL      $5,075.00   TERMS NET-30

What Hearth builds.

Three schedules, one system. The audit finds the workflow; the build ships it; the web layer makes the firm legible to the buyers — and the answer engines — who go looking.

Who this paper is addressed to.

• Oilfield & energy services

  Service companies with real field operations and a back office that runs on spreadsheets and resolve. Houston-adjacent by design.

  You recognize yourself if a ticket touches four hands before it becomes an invoice.

• Industrial service firms

  Inspection, rental, maintenance, logistics — businesses that quote, dispatch, invoice, and chase, mostly by hand.

  You recognize yourself if the person who knows the process is also the bottleneck.

• Credit & fintech teams

  Credit, AR, and portfolio-risk groups that need drafts they can defend — with the reasoning attached and a person on every decision.

  You recognize yourself if the annual review season has its own dread.

How an engagement runs.

1. ✓

   Audit two weeks, fixed fee

   We sit with the people who do the work and map one workflow end to end — every handoff, every rekeying, every judgment call. You keep the map whether or not we build.

2. ✓

   Build weeks, not quarters

   We build the drafting system with the holds where your judgment lives — like Exhibit A. Your team reviews real output from week one, on your data, under your rules.

3. ✓

   Handover you own it

   Runbooks, training, and the keys. We hand over; we don’t hover. A maintenance retainer exists for those who want it — it is optional on purpose.

The firm.

Hearth Advisory is led by a credit and portfolio-risk professional who has written the memos, run the rescreens, and sat through the annual-review seasons this paper describes. The firm is small on purpose: senior attention on every engagement, no handoff to a bench. We build with modern AI tooling and an old habit — showing our work.

Appendix B — Terms of candor

• B.1No unsourced ROI numbers, here or anywhere. If we quote a figure, we show its working.
• B.2Every example is labeled synthetic until a client agrees, in writing, to be named.
• B.3We decline work where AI shouldn’t make the call — and we will tell you when a spreadsheet is enough.
• B.4Your data is not used to train public models. Ever.
• B.5Every system we ship halts for a human at the decision. This is an architecture, not a setting.

Reply slip — request the audit

To engage us, reply to this paper. Tell us the one workflow that costs you your evenings; we will tell you, plainly, whether it is worth automating.

Signatures