LLM systems · Cloud solutions

Signal. Everything else is noise you've learned to live with.

I build the systems that let individuals, family offices, nonprofits and small-to-mid businesses prove their impact and run without one person in every loop — shaped around how the work actually happens, not how software vendors wish it did.

LLM systemsCloud solutionsWeb platformsAutomation

The platform

Built for how small organizations actually work.

The Steward suite — donor CRM, case management, intake and grants, voice capture, compliance training, and legacy planning — plus Mainspring, Trellis and Plumbline, which stand on their own. Not a demo. Not a roadmap. Running in production with partner organizations today.

StewardConnect donor CRM reporting interface

DRM · Donor relationship management

StewardConnect™

Donor management run by Stewie™, a built-in AI Chief of Staff — ask any donor question in plain English, and the acknowledgments, insights and follow-ups that used to need a data analyst happen on their own.

See the full product →

StewardFlow in production — resident progress and outcome chart alongside phase and departure-outcome reporting

Case management

StewardFlow™

Case management for any cohort on a timeline — recovery programs, daycares, schools, new-hire onboarding, re-entry — with outcomes tracking and a budget planner, built so the reporting comes out of the work instead of on top of it.

See the full product →

StewardPulse in production — resident intake instrument across identification, substance use, mental health, medical, legal, and social sections

Intake & grants

StewardPulse™

Intake and grant data, captured once and reused everywhere — from first contact through final reporting.

See the full product →

StewardPlanner Family Constitution — the printed cover page of a family covenant document

Legacy planning

StewardPlanner™

The Family Constitution — a written covenant, not a legal instrument but a moral one. It answers the questions an estate plan was never designed to ask, in eleven articles a family fills in together and every generation re-signs.

Read the eleven articles →

StewardScribe — voice capture that files speech as finished documents

Voice capture

StewardScribe™

Talk, let go, done. Clean text for texts, emails, and reports — or a dated case note filed straight into the resident’s own file. Stores nothing, runs on the phone you already carry.

Speak it. It’s filed. →

Trellis — the lattice-and-vine mark beside the wordmark and the line Structure underneath. Growth above.

Small business · back office

Trellis™

The structure underneath a small business so the owner can stop being the system. See how the work moves, set it on structure you own, keep it running on a steady rhythm — built on the records you already keep. You own everything, always; no contract. Its own tool, not part of the Steward suite.

Structure underneath. Growth above. →

StewardConnect™ · Automations · the engine behind the scenes

Every donor’s year-end tax statement — sent auto‑magically.

Most nonprofits lose the first week of January digging a year of gifts out of a spreadsheet and mailing tax statements one at a time while donors wait to file. StewardConnect does the whole thing in one pass — every donor’s giving statement for the year, generated, personalized and sent, with nobody typing. Your worst week of the year, gone before coffee. The rest of the year the same engine keeps the small touches coming: the instant thank-you and IRS receipt, the welcome, the first-gift anniversary, the gentle note when a faithful giver goes quiet. Flip a switch once; it runs itself. Watch:

Mainspring — a coiled brass spring on an engine-turned graphite tile, beside the wordmark and the line Wound once. Runs on its own.

Capital · finance & arbitrage

Mainspring™

Capital systems built to run without you — automated arbitrage engines, the models to track them, the sequencing and tax structure to keep more of it, and the basis planning that decides what your heirs actually receive. Options from your own numbers, not financial advice. Its own tool, not part of the Steward suite.

Wound once. Runs on its own. →

Plumbline sample statement showing net worth of $865,561 above a red line marking $529,400 owed, with freshness disclosed as 8% priced live, 82% sourced within 180 days, and 10% flagged stale

Net worth · with provenance

Plumbline

A client net worth statement where every figure carries its source and the date it was recorded, and anything past 180 days is flagged instead of shown as current. Its own tool, not part of the Steward suite.

See a sample statement →

Selected work

A few other things I've shipped.

The Steward suite is the flagship, but the same approach — understand the real workflow, then build the smallest thing that fixes it — shows up everywhere else too. Select an entry to read the detail.

Plus a handful of smaller builds: grant-reporting tools, member portals, and the site you're looking at right now.

Not a philosophy — a procedure

Praxis πρᾶξις

Greek — action, doing. Knowledge that only counts once it’s acted on.

Automation requires clear articulation.

A machine does what you said, not what you meant. Saying it precisely is the work — and it comes before anything gets built.

How the work gets done

  1. SignalListen for the signal.
  2. AlphaFind the alpha.
  3. AgencyTake agency.

How money moves · StewardFlow™ methodology

Not the percentage. Not the amount. The same order, every time money arrives.

First

Give

Off the top, before anything else is allocated.

Second

Saveinvest

Set aside before spending starts — not from what survives it.

Third

Bills

Housing and obligations paid in their turn.

Fourth

Live

What remains is free to live on.

Most budgeting starts with the bills and hopes something is left. This starts with what matters and works down, so the first two are never what gets squeezed — the sequence held by StewardFlow™ instead of by willpower.

Creative

Long-form pieces, start to finish.

Each one researched, written, illustrated, and built — not templated. The same care that goes into a donor CRM goes into a design history or a travel feature.

The whole body of work

Everything, in one frame.

A collage of the work: the Steward product marks, the Mainspring, Trellis, Plumbline and StewardScribe cards, the Satchmo, Van Gogh, Basquiat, Patek, G-Shock and Small Museums covers, the Manet and Brontë rooms, dashboards and charts, and the drip, dot and guilloche textures behind the site
The Century That Broke the Frame · Eight Women · G-Shock · Small Museums · Credo · Basquiat · Van Gogh · The Paper Trail · Satchmo · Mainspring · Trellis · StewardScribe · StewardPlanner · StewardConnect · the Steward marks Editorial, presentations & builds · Benjamin Stafford

Credentials & stack

Credentialed for both the care and the code.

Fifteen-plus years of revenue and team leadership, credentialed on both sides of the work — the human side and the technical side.

Certified Peer Support Specialist

FAVOR Lowcountry — Faces and Voices of Recovery

MIT Professional Education (CSAIL)

AI & LLMs solving business outcomes

Cisco Meraki CMNA

Cisco Meraki Network Associate

Programs & systems in active use

Everything below is running in production on a client engagement or on this site — not a list of things I've read about.

Cloud & infrastructure

Cloudflare Workers·Pages·D1·KV·DNS·direct-upload deployments·Wrangler CLI·Edge caching & CDN·Netlify

Email, DNS & deliverability

Cloudflare Email Routing·Custom-domain forwarding·MX·SPF·DKIM·DMARC·TXT & CNAME verification·Registrar delegate access & domain transfers (GoDaddy)·RDAP & WHOIS lookups·Resend·Brevo·Zoho Mail SMTP relay·Pages Functions·SMTP relay & send-as·Transactional templates

AI & automation

Anthropic API·Agent SDK·Model Context Protocol·Agentic tool orchestration·Retrieval-augmented generation·Prompt & context engineering·Structured output & JSON schemas·Browser automation·Scheduled workers & cron·Webhook pipelines

Web build & delivery

Semantic HTML5·CSS Grid & Flexbox·Custom properties·Responsive & mobile-first·SVG filters & procedural texture·IntersectionObserver·Fetch API·Progressive enhancement·ARIA & keyboard accessibility·prefers-reduced-motion·Schema.org JSON-LD·Open Graph & Twitter Cards·Canonical URLs·Google Fonts·Core Web Vitals & lazy loading

Document & image pipeline

Python imaging (Pillow)·PyMuPDF·ReportLab PDF generation & fillable forms·python-docx templating·Programmatic SVG & brand-asset generation (CairoSVG)·PDF rendering & extraction·Programmatic redaction·Compositing & color grading·Asset optimization

Google Workspace & Apps Script

Apps Script·Sheets automation & custom functions·SpreadsheetApp·DocumentApp·GmailApp·DriveApp·CalendarApp·FormApp·UrlFetchApp·PropertiesService·Time-driven triggers·Custom menus & sidebars·Sheets·Docs·Drive·Forms·Looker Studio

Development

Node.js·Electron·JavaScript·HTML & CSS·Python·SQL·Git·PowerShell·REST APIs·JSON-LD & structured data

Operations, finance & creative

Trellis™ back-office system·Plumbline·Google Drive folder systems & shared-drive custody·USPTO trademark search & clearance (TESS / TSDR)·QuickBooks Online·Zeffy·Canva Professional·Meta Business Suite·Google Business Profile·LinkedIn Pages·Trello·Sling·RouteXL·Adobe PDF workflows·SaaS administration

Get in touch

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