The labor spread
Work priced at $45 an hour that a well-constrained model completes for cents — intake, classification, extraction, summarisation, first-draft everything.
Operators we build for
- Meridian Freight
- Halcyon Legal
- Northbound Health
- Kessler & Roe
- Tidewater Capital
- Hours returned monthly
- 0
- Avg. weeks to payback
- 0
- First-year return
- 0x
- Systems in production
- 0
Figures shown are illustrative placeholders pending verified engagement data.
The thesis
Three spreads sit inside almost every operation.
Arbitrage is simply the discipline of noticing that the same thing is priced two different ways. Inside operations, it shows up three times.
The latency spread
Decisions that take three days because they sit in a queue, when the information needed to make them was complete on day one.
The attention spread
Your most expensive people doing your least expensive work. The cost is not their salary — it is the judgment you are not buying with it.
What we build
Systems, not demos.
Everything below ships with evaluation harnesses, audit logs, and a human in the loop wherever the cost of being wrong is real.
Document & intake pipelines
Ingest anything — PDFs, faxes, email threads, scans. Extract structured fields, validate against your rules, route to the right queue with a confidence score attached to every decision.
Customer operations agents
Triage, draft, and resolve tier-one volume. Escalate the rest with full context already assembled.
Revenue intelligence
Enrichment, scoring, and routing so the pipeline is ranked by something better than the order it arrived in.
Internal copilots
Retrieval over your own systems — contracts, tickets, wikis, the shared drive nobody has opened since 2019 — with citations back to the source.
Back-office automation
Reconciliation, reporting, and the month-end scramble — reduced to an exception list.
Evaluation & guardrails
The part most agencies skip. Golden datasets, regression suites, and drift alarms, so quality is measured rather than assumed.
Process
Priced like a trade, not a project.
You should know the size of the spread before you commit capital to closing it. That is what the audit is for.
-
01
Audit
We sit with your team, map every process that touches a queue, and put a number on each one: volume, unit cost, error rate, and the spread available. You get the model whether or not you continue.
-
02
Pilot
One workflow. Real volume, in production, measured against the baseline we established in the audit. If it does not beat the baseline, you do not scale it.
-
03
Scale
Expand into adjacent processes that share the same infrastructure. Each addition is cheaper than the last, because the hard part was the first one.
-
04
Hand-off
You own the code, the prompts, the evals, and the documentation. No proprietary runtime, no hostage situation. We are happy to stay; you are never stuck with us.
Results
What closing the spread looks like.
Series B fintech · Manhattan
0 hrs
Claims intake, down from 4 days
Document extraction plus rules-based validation removed the manual keying step entirely. Two reviewers now handle exceptions only.
Logistics · Brooklyn
0 FTE
Redeployed to customer work
Rate quoting and carrier email triage automated end to end. No headcount reduction — the same people moved to work that compounds.
Legal services · Midtown
0x
Contract review throughput
First-pass clause extraction with citation back to source. Partners review the flagged 12%, not all of it.
“They spent the first two weeks telling us which of our ideas were not worth doing. That is when we knew we had the right firm.”
Case figures and testimonial are illustrative placeholders.
Questions
Before you book.
Is this going to replace my team?
That is your call, not ours, and we will say plainly that most of our engagements do not reduce headcount. The spread is usually captured by moving people off queue work and onto work that compounds. We will model both outcomes in the audit so you can decide with numbers rather than vibes.
What if the audit says there is no spread?
Then we tell you, you keep the process map, and we part on good terms. It has happened. A firm that will not deliver that finding is not doing an audit, it is doing a sales call.
Whose infrastructure does this run on?
Yours. We deploy into your cloud account, your VPC, your observability stack. Data residency and retention follow your policy, not ours.
How do you handle accuracy and hallucination?
Constrained outputs, retrieval with citations, confidence thresholds that route low-certainty items to a human, and a regression suite that runs on every change. Where being wrong is expensive, a person signs off. Always.
Do you work outside New York?
We do, but we are deliberate about it. The audit works far better in person, so we prioritise clients we can reach on the subway. Remote engagements start after a first on-site week.
How quickly can we start?
Audits typically begin within two to three weeks of the first call. We run a small number of engagements at a time on purpose.
Get started
Let us find the spread.
Thirty minutes. Bring one process that feels more expensive than it should be, and we will tell you on the call whether it is worth an audit.
- New York, NY
- info@ironcladmarketing.us
- Replies within one business day