I'll tell you why a CFO firm started doing AI consulting, because the story explains what makes this different from every other AI pitch you've heard.
I'm Dawson Schrader. I co-founded 1610 Advisory with Mike Scheffert. We're fractional CFOs. I'm also head of finance at a construction company doing $3M to $5M a year, and I run a family farm south of Lincoln that's been in my family for six generations. When I started building AI tools for my own businesses, I noticed something: every conversation I had with a tech vendor about AI was missing the financial question. They could tell me what the tool did. They couldn't tell me whether the math worked. That's why we started doing this. We build AI tools, we run businesses, and we do the books. Most AI consultants can only do one of those.
What working with us looks like
We don't sell AI. We figure out whether it's the right move for your specific business, and if it is, we build it.
The money question first
Before we talk about tools, we talk about your numbers. What are you spending time on? What does that time cost? If AI can't beat that number, we say so and move on.
Built into what you already use
Nobody wants to rip out their systems and start over. We connect AI to the tools your team already knows. Your CRM, your accounting software, your project tools.
Someone in the seat, ongoing
This isn't a one-time engagement that leaves you on your own. We stay involved month to month, adjusting as your business changes and as AI tools get better or worse.
Your team actually uses it
An AI tool nobody touches is just a subscription fee. We train your people until they're comfortable, and we check in to make sure the tools are still earning their keep.
The kinds of businesses we understand
We work with businesses that run on people making decisions and doing skilled work. If your team spends hours each week on things that follow a pattern, reporting, scheduling, moving data between systems, chasing down information, there's usually a real conversation to be had about whether AI handles some of that. Not all of it. Some of it.
You can see what I've built
I open-sourced an AI system called the AI CMO. It manages content strategy, SEO, analytics, and client operations for multiple businesses at once. It's not a prototype. It runs in production every day for real companies with real revenue.
I put it on GitHub because I think you should be able to look at someone's work before you trust them with yours: Midnight-Farmer/ai-cmo
I also built the financial dashboards for a construction company. They pull from QuickBooks and generate reports automatically. Anything I recommend to a client, I've used in my own businesses first.
Why a CFO firm does AI consulting
Every AI tool has a monthly cost, a setup cost, and a maintenance cost. It takes your team time to learn it. It takes time away from something else during the transition. If nobody is looking at the full picture, the financial picture, then "this tool is amazing" might also be "this tool costs more than it saves."
That's why we do this from inside a CFO firm. We know what your margins look like. We know what an extra 10 hours a week is actually worth in your business. So we won't recommend something that sounds good in a demo but doesn't make sense on your P&L.
Let's look at the numbers together.
30 minutes. You tell me about your business, I'll ask about where time and money are going, and we'll figure out if AI changes the math. If it doesn't, I'll say so.