~ the catalog of dishes

The Station Menu

Sixty dishes. Six stations. One sequence. The Station Plan tells you the shape of the kitchen. The Prep List tells you which dish to write first. This is the menu, every dish on every station, ordered the way you'd actually build them. Easiest at the top. Hardest at the bottom. The same logic on every station.

Read it as a roadmap. The first three dishes on any station can be live in a week. The last three are where most operators stall, not because the tools fail, but because the recipe gets harder to write the further down you go.

The six stations

The Sales Station

The Sales Station does what the rep would rather not do. The selling (conversations, discovery, relationship) is not the problem. The paperwork, research, drafting, and follow-up is. AI doesn't replace selling. It removes the permission structure that lets reps stay shallow.

First dish: Lead Enrichment →

The Marketing Station

The Marketing Station's job is simple on its face: turn the Chef's voice into something a market can hear. In practice, it is the station where most deployments fail. Not because the tools can't write. Because the Chef never wrote down what the Chef sounds like.

First dish: Repurposing →

The Service Station

The Service Station holds the customer relationship after the sale. It's where trust either deepens or vanishes. The reason most deployments fail here is simple. generic output costs real money when the customer reads it. The Chef never writes down what tone to use when a customer is angry versus confused versus at risk. Sentiment data sits in folders because no one defined the scoreboard. The station can't run trust-work without examples and guardrails wired in before deployment.

First dish: Inbox Triage →

The Operations Station

Operations is where the unglamorous, load-bearing work lives. Document sorting, data extraction, report generation, meeting prep. The work nobody writes case studies about and every business breaks down without. The Chef's habit problem on Operations isn't "AI can't sort our mail." It's "we never wrote the schema down so we never gave the station something to hit." The reason most operations AI deployments fail is simple. The schema is missing.

First dish: Document Classification →

The Finance Station

The Finance Station turns raw numbers into decisions and keeps the books from running the business. Most operators have AI doing categorization and AP triage already. Those are the easy plates. The hard plates are variance commentary, the close narrative, the board package. The work where numbers become a story leadership can act on. The Chef's habit problem on Finance isn't AI gets the math wrong. It's we never wrote down what a board member needs to see in two minutes.

First dish: Expense Categorization →

The Research Station

The Research Station turns information into the operator's edge without becoming a research organization you don't need. Most operators think research means stalking competitors and hoping a pattern emerges. The real work is narrower. Define the signal. Define the cadence. Define the format. Let the station run. The Chef's habit problem on Research isn't AI gives me too much information. It's we never wrote down what counts as signal versus noise. Without that definition, the station drowns in facts. With one, it produces a 200-word morning briefing that actually changes Monday's move.

First dish: News and Signal Monitoring →

How to read the order

Dishes 1-3 ship in a week. The training data already exists in your business: past emails, won deals, recap notes, transactions. Point the station at what's already there.

Dishes 4-6 cross a threshold. Guardrails have to be written, context has to be plumbed, examples have to be deliberate. Cost of being wrong rises. Recipe quality starts to matter.

Dishes 7-10 are taste work. The station drafts. The Chef tastes. The Chef stays in the loop on every plate. Most operators try to start here. They hit the wall and conclude AI isn't ready. It is. They started at the wrong end of the menu.

Pick a station. Read down the list until you hit the first dish your business doesn't already do well. Start there.

See the framework family →