Forge Tier 1: Build Your Own — Proposal

Prepared for: RCB Awards (Briana, Cindi, and Karen)

What this is

You don't want me to build you a tool and walk away. You told me — all three of you — that you want to build these systems yourselves. This is the engagement for that.

For one week, I set up your environment, sit with you, and we build your first real working systems together — on your actual work, in your own words. I teach you the architecture as we go, so you leave able to build the next one without me. You own everything outright. There's no subscription, ever.

It's $10,000, one-time. Roughly a week of mornings, fully remote. At the end, each of you has built something real for your own job — and knows how to keep building.

Where this came from

This isn't a cold pitch. It's the natural next step from the afternoon I showed you how I actually run my own work inside this system.

The room lit up, and what struck me was that the energy wasn't about getting a finished thing — it was about doing it yourselves:

• Briana: "It's tantalizing… I'm kind of inclined to learn more about doing it ourselves — it just gives us the most flexibility and options." You connected it to something you'd felt for years — that you wished you'd invested more in understanding technology — and saw that this lets you be the architect without needing to know four programming languages.
• Cindi: "I'm all in. I really would love to learn this — an amazing addition to my goal of continuing to learn until I die."
• Karen: you recognized it immediately — "it's a higher level of programming" — and tracked the reusable logic the whole way through, landing on it yourself: "you're getting the outputs for your example, but you're also building the processing documents at the same time."

The appetite is real. What's been missing is the runway to get from interested to self-sufficient without months of solo trial and error. That's exactly what this week is.

What Forge Tier 1 is

You work inside my live cockpit — the same system I use to produce client work every day — and together we build a mirror of it in your language, for your workflows. Specifically, across the week:

1. I set up your whole environment — the editor, Claude Code, version control, and the cockpit structure — working and ready on day one.
2. We build 2–3 of your real workflows, live, together. Not demos — actual tools for actual work you each own. I narrate every step as we go, so it's repeatable and the logic is yours, not a black box.
3. I teach you the architecture, not just the result. The point isn't the three tools we build — it's that you understand how they're built, so the fourth one is yours to make alone.
4. You get access to my own workflow library — proven templates, simple to medium, so you're always customizing from a working base instead of staring at a blank file.
5. A 30-day "I'm stuck" tail after we finish, so the momentum doesn't die the first time something doesn't behave.

What you come out with isn't a product I hand over. It's a working operating system you own — and the know-how to keep extending it.

What you get out of it

Two things change, permanently:

1. The production work that eats your hours drops to minutes. The documenting, the drafting, the reformatting, the circling-back — the machine does the repeatable 80% and you keep the 20% of judgment that's actually yours. Same quality, a fraction of the grind.
2. You can build any new capability you can imagine — your exact way — in under an hour. This isn't a fixed tool you're stuck with. It's a tool that builds tools. A process changes, you rewire it on the spot. A new idea shows up, you have a working version before lunch.

The first one is almost certainly yours, Briana — the meeting-and-follow-up overwhelm you named: "the meetings are coming faster than I can get done and prepared." We already proved it in two minutes during the session — drop in messy notes, get back action items, a decision log, draft follow-up emails, and a one-screen status digest. That's the natural first thing we build for real, with you driving.

Format

• About a week, four hours each morning — roughly 20 focused hours — when your heads are freshest for systems thinking. Nobody builds well for eight hours straight, so we don't pretend to.
• Afternoons are yours. Step away and come back fresh, or go play with what we built and bring your questions to the next morning — we work through them live as we keep building.
• Fully remote. We build live off my multi-screen rig, screen-shared with you — it's faster and more powerful than working on a single laptop, and I already know your shop from the weeks I spent on-site. No travel days to pay for.

Who's in the room

Briana, Cindi, and Karen — the three of you who asked to learn it. Each of you builds against a workflow you actually own, so what we make is real from the first morning. You each have different instincts (Briana the architect's view, Cindi the lifelong-learner's patience, Karen the systems-thinker's eye), and the week is built to use all three.

What you bring

• A business Claude account on the ~$200/month plan — the higher-tier plan, sized for three active users doing large-context, build-heavy work. (The free tier and the entry plan won't carry this kind of building.)
• The three of you, and the time to sit in the morning sessions and practice between them.
• A few of your own real workflows to build against — the messier and more real, the better.

What done looks like

By the end of the week, each of you has built at least one working tool for your own job, and can scaffold a new one on your own afterward. RCB keeps extending its own systems — without needing me in the room.

Investment

$10,000, one-time. You own everything, forever. No subscription, no per-seat fee, nothing that recurs.

This isn't priced by the hour — you're not buying a chunk of my time. You're buying a permanent upgrade to how the three of you work: the ability to do your existing work in a fraction of the time and build any new capability you can think of, your exact way. If it gives each of you back even a few hours a week — and it will give you more — it pays for itself inside a season and keeps paying every year after.

Where it goes from here

This week stands completely on its own — you leave self-sufficient. But if you later want to go further, there are two natural paths, and neither is something you have to decide now:

• I come back and build the harder systems with you — once you're running on your own and want to tackle something more complex than you'd build solo.
• A fully managed version, run through Rogue Agents — where the whole operating system gets built and operated for you and you only ever work in your own workflow.

For now, this is the one that matches what you actually asked for: teach us to build it ourselves.