More accounts, same six people.

What I found, and where the ceiling is.

SPEC turned ten last year. Six or seven of you, earned media and experiential work across around sixteen brand and cause accounts on your public roster, with Yamaha the anchor across Motorsports and Bicycles, and the Outdoor Access Initiative you have administered for close to twenty years.

A ten-year-old shop with a roster that size and an anchor client across two divisions is not a business with an operations problem. Your About page puts it better than I would: “Our worth isn’t in hours worked, but in the value of our work product.” You already keep a curated list of trusted sources rather than trusting a firehose, and you already know which two things you want built. Most people I talk to do not.

There is nobody on your public team page whose job is monitoring and reporting. So I have assumed the reading, the filtering, and the assembly land on senior people who are also the ones doing the strategy and the storytelling. That is the ceiling: taking on another account means those same people finding more hours, and there are no more hours. If there is someone I cannot see from outside, tell me and every number in here changes.

What I heard around it was that your current tools stop at the outlet. You keep a curated list of trusted sources, and what you actually want is coverage on a specific target, Yamaha motorcycles or off-road as a topic, out of your list, filtered by the writer and by the topic inside the coverage. Which means the ten hours is a person reading down that list by hand and assembling the recap at the end of it.

At $50 an hour all-in, the coverage motion costs about $2,250 a month, or $27,000 a year, in senior time. That is the one dollar figure in this document that covers the whole motion, and no single agent takes all of it. The second agent below runs on a separate pool of time entirely, and a deliberate share of the coverage motion stays with your people. Everything further down is a slice of that one number, not a second one.

Your curated source list lives inside the app, named and editable, so you add or drop an outlet whenever the beat shifts. You type what you are chasing, as broad or as narrow as you like, optionally limited to specific writers, and run it. The agent goes out to only your sources, pulls recent coverage, reads each article to confirm who actually wrote it, classifies the topic semantically rather than by keyword, dedupes across outlets, and hands back a structured table: date, outlet, author, headline, topic tags, a one-line summary, sentiment, and the link. One click turns that into a clip report. Another drafts a client-ready summary that a person approves before it goes anywhere.

• Precision below the outlet. Your current tool gives you everything from Cycle News. This gives you every motorcycle story by the writers you care about, across your whole list, already summarized.
• Your list, not a vendor’s index. The sources are yours to add and drop, so the agent follows the beat instead of a subscription tier.
• The byline is verified, not scraped. It opens each article and confirms the author before it filters by writer, which is the step that makes writer-level filtering trustworthy.
• The clip report is a by-product. The assembly at the end of the morning stops being a separate job.
• Nothing goes to a client on its own. The run ends at a draft a strategist reads and approves. There is no auto-send in this build, and I am not proposing one.

Running live in this page on public data, not yours. The build points the same retrieval at your own corpus. That distinction matters enough that it is stated again next to the console and under the results.

It is the same instinct behind the comment that started this. On my offline-LLM post you tagged Tyler: “In case we have needs for a purpose built app.” Both of these are exactly that shape.

This one does not show up as a line item, which is why it survives. It shows up as a senior person opening old decks to answer a question the agency already knows the answer to, and as a dealer or a recipient waiting on a reply because the answer lives in somebody’s memory rather than anywhere you can query. It comes out of the same senior people as the coverage work, but out of a separate pool of time that sits outside the coverage motion entirely, so it is not a second claim on the number above. What it is worth is in the tiles further down this page and in the table on the next one.

One place to ask what is buried in a decade of decks, reports and grant history. Two audiences, because you named two: your team asking what SPEC has done for a client and what came of it, and dealers or recipients asking what grant-funded projects are near them. It handles the loop you described in the other direction too, matching a recipient who needs on-the-ground support to the dealers best placed to give it. Every answer cites the document it came from, so it cannot invent a grant or a dealer, and anything outward-facing stops at a draft a person signs off on.

• The archaeology stops. A question the agency has already answered gets answered from the record instead of from memory.
• Two audiences, one build. The internal view and the outward view are the same retrieval with different disclosure rules, not two products.
• It matches in both directions. Projects near a dealer, and dealers near a recipient who needs support on the ground.
• Citations are the feature. Every claim carries the document it came from, so anyone can check it rather than trust it.
• It declines rather than guesses. When the record does not contain something, it says so by name. And nothing outward-facing sends itself. A person at SPEC reviews anything a dealer or a recipient would see.

The whole calculation, in one table.

Every step is here so you can check it instead of taking my word for it. If a line is wrong, it is wrong in a way you can point at.

The coverage motion costs about $2,250 a month. The coverage agent takes back $1,250 of it. The knowledge agent adds $750 out of a separate pool that sits outside the coverage motion entirely. The remaining $1,000 stays with your people on purpose, because deciding what a piece of coverage means and what to tell Yamaha about it is the part worth their hours. No one agent replaces the whole problem, and none should.

You did not give me payroll figures, so rather than guess I used public wage data for your own metro. Woodland Hills sits in Los Angeles County, inside the Los Angeles–Long Beach–Anaheim MSA. That is the right geography and the most precise one available, because the Bureau of Labor Statistics stopped publishing wage estimates at the metropolitan-division level after 2018.

• The number I did not use. Public relations managers, which BLS puts at a median of $163,830 in your metro, about $110 an hour loaded. In Los Angeles that occupation is full of studio and corporate communications leadership at large media companies, not a six-person boutique.
• The number I used. Public relations specialists in the same metro, a median of $79,860, which loads to about $53 an hour. Then rounded down to $50.
• Cross-checked against local postings. BPM-PR Firm lists a senior publicist at $45,000 to $65,000; Larson Communications lists a senior account executive at $56,500 to $85,000; ZipRecruiter and Salary.com both put a Los Angeles PR account executive’s middle band at roughly $63,000 to $100,000.
• The load factor is 1.4x, from the BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation series: benefits and payroll tax run about 30% of total compensation in private industry.
• One rate, not two, because both pools of time belong to the same senior comms people. I would rather you be able to check a single figure than trust an average.

I have almost certainly been conservative. At a shop where everyone is senior, your real loaded cost per hour is probably above the metro median for the occupation, and if it is, every figure here goes up proportionally.

Cut every one of these numbers by a third, the way I stress-test every model I hand over, and it is about $1,335 a month. Our standard audit guarantee is this, word for word: “If we don’t find at least $5,000 a month in saveable ops cost, you don’t pay.” I waived your fee, so there is nothing to refund either way — but on the hours you have put a number on, I do not get to $5,000 a month.

The two agents are worth more wired together than bought separately. Every coverage run can append to a growing corpus, so six months in, asking what you have seen on e-bike trail access this year becomes a question the knowledge agent answers from your own accumulated research rather than from a search. That is Phase 2, and it is the piece that makes these one system instead of two purchases. It carries no dollars in this model, on purpose.

Ranked against the two things you named.

Phase 1 is the two agents, and it is where I would spend the money. Phase 2 is what turns them from tools you open into systems that run on their own. Phase 3 is the revenue side, and it only makes sense after Phase 1 has proved out.

Items 03 and 04 are concepts, not commitments. 03 depends on whether the research is genuinely repetitive week to week or different every time. 04 depends on whether you want to look back at old research or only ever forward. Both are one sentence from you away from being decidable, and neither carries a dollar in the model.

Item 05 carries zero dollars on purpose. You told me your clients would use the grant and knowledge tool, which makes it something SPEC could sell rather than only run internally. That changes who the buyer is and how it is priced, so it is deliberately outside every number in this document. It is worth opening once Phase 1 has a track record, and worth doing properly with a revenue split rather than bolted onto a retainer.

• Both Phase 1 agents built on your source list and your knowledge, with a thirty-day hypercare period while they bed in.
• Ongoing optimization, monitoring and a business-hours response window on the managed layer, with fail-safe and human-in-the-loop checks so nothing breaks silently.
• Monthly reporting from the agents’ own run logs: hours and dollars saved, counted from their records rather than from anyone’s memory.
• New builds as your needs change, included in the managed layer rather than quoted each time.
• Full documentation and export on demand, and least-privilege access to only what the agents need.

Phase 1, and nothing else.

For a six-person shop in the middle of a busy year I would not try to do everything at once. Install the two agents you named. One of them already runs.

• Is the ten hours a week the whole task across the team, or ten hours for each strategist who does it? I read it the conservative way. At two strategists the model lands near $3,500 a month, past twice the retainer, and the 2x promise I declined becomes one I could actually put in writing. One sentence from you settles it.
• Roughly what does an hour of your senior people actually cost, all-in? Even a ballpark. I used a public metro median and I think I have undershot you.
• What monitoring tool are you on today, and what does it cost a month? If the coverage agent replaces it, that is a hard-dollar saving on top of everything here. Right now it is a zero in my model.
• Where does the ten years of knowledge actually live (Drive, Notion, email, a shared drive of decks), and is any of it client-confidential? That decides what we connect to and what we wall off.
• How often does anyone lose time hunting through it? My twenty hours a month is an assumption, and yours would replace it.
• For the grant agent, who are the external users — Yamaha dealers, OAI recipients, or both? Access and permissions differ a lot between those.

Get me these and I will lock the numbers before we settle the build scope. If they come back stronger than my estimates, the guarantee number goes up with them.

Nothing in here is a slide or a screenshot.

Most AI pitches show you a recording. Both agents on this page are deployed services you can run from your own browser: agent 01 goes out to live outlets and reads what it finds, and agent 02 answers from a corpus where every claim carries the link it came from. If an endpoint is down when you try it, it will tell you so, and if a live run stalls, a recent cached run stands in and says on screen that it is cached rather than passing itself off as live.

The credibility asset behind that is Powr, my own product, not a client — a live application I built, shipped and run, which is where the engineering behind these agents comes from. I am a solo operator, and I would rather you know that going in than find it out in month two.

How our thirty minutes runs.

Short call, so this is the order, and the pages above are laid out to match it. Anything we do not get to is in this document to read afterwards.