The engagement · If you want this
You have seen the picture. Here is how you get it.
The screen drew your ghost twin from five answers, with every pillar as an outline and every measure waiting for a baseline. An engagement turns the outlines solid from your own ledger, your documents and your people, and marks how each entry is supported. This page says who the first step is for, what we each commit to, and how the conversation begins.
Who the first step is for
A leader with the authority to decide, and no governance team to hand it to.
The engagement is written for a leader at a firm of roughly 50 to 500 people, who has the budget and the authority to put artificial intelligence (AI) to work and nobody whose job it is to say whether the AI can be trusted. You will be the one person from reading this page to holding the twin.
Most of the leaders we talk to have already started. There is a pilot, or three, a vendor contract, and an agent that somebody in sales connected to the customer system over lunch, and the honest fear is that starting right means starting over. It does not. A company that has already begun backs up one step and runs Step Zero while the inventory of what it has already built is made alongside. What you have built is not wasted. It is unplaced, and placing it is most of the work. If your pilots have stalled and you need a reset, you are the reader this page was written for, because you already have a budget and you already feel the problem.
The first step
The first step is one engagement.
The first step is Step Zero with the inventory alongside it. It has one scope, one deliverable and a dated baseline that you keep whether or not there is a second step. It is contracted as one engagement for a fixed fee. The founding price of the first step is $7,500 for a firm of any size, and the scope is set with you in the first conversation rather than before it.
What it leaves you holding is the ghost twin turned solid where the first step reaches: the dated pre-AI baseline from your own ledger, the register of every agent, tool and vendor found in the firm with a named owner for each, the gaps between what is running and what the business wrote down as its goals, and the picture itself, which is yours to take a complete copy of on any day you choose. The steps that follow are described on the five steps page, and each one is a separate decision.
The terms
What we each commit to, in writing.
The engagement carries a shared commitment, and it is signed before the work starts. The chief executive sponsors the work, leads the Step Zero session and attends each review in person. One named operating leader owns each decision the engagement takes up and the measure that goes with it. Your team answers questions and grants access to records on the schedule we agree. Mortar Cloud delivers each step on the agreed date for the fixed fee, takes no commission from any vendor, and recommends no tool it is paid to recommend. When a commitment slips on either side, the clock pauses rather than the price rising.
A chief executive who will not sign that has said, in effect, that the engagement would fail, and it is better to know on this page than in the third week. Nothing in the method is hidden from you once we begin. You are looking at the whole of the end state from the first morning, and the engagement is the work of filling it in.
How the conversation begins
A short form, and one conversation.
The intake asks who you are, roughly how large the firm is, where you stand with AI today and what is already running. We read every one and write back to arrange the first conversation, which is about an hour and asks nothing of you but your time. You do not need to prepare anything. The ledger and the documents come later, under the engagement letter, and only once we have both decided to go ahead.
If you arrived here without seeing the demonstration, it is the better place to start: the Hollister Reed twin, a fictional firm's picture from the ghost on the first morning to the end. The engagement's own page, closing the Inception Void, says why the work begins where it does, and our founder's essay The Inception Void sets out the argument at length.