The Operator's Stack: What I Actually Built and Why
I've spent 32 years in enterprise IT — communications, collaboration, infrastructure. No practical development experience. No coding background. And over the past year I built a custom AI system from scratch that now runs the back-office operations of six companies.
This is my writeup of what that actually looked like. Not the polished version — the real one.
Why I built it
I run six companies under 2057 Holdings. On top of that, two W-2 consulting engagements with enterprise clients. Twenty-five mailboxes across six brands. Every company has its own Stripe account, its own CRM, its own books, its own brand identity.
The operational overhead was becoming the job. Email, task management, CRM hygiene, financial monitoring, document handling — I was spending more time managing the infrastructure of running businesses than actually running them. The usual answer is to hire. I wanted to find out how far I could push before that became unavoidable.
I wasn't disorganized. I had Zapier, GoHighLevel, a CRM, accounting software. The problem wasn't that I didn't have tools. The problem was that every tool I had wanted me to conform to it. I wanted a system that conformed to how I actually work.
What I built
I called it JARVIS. It's a custom AI chief-of-staff running on Cloudflare Workers and Supabase. I built it with Claude doing the heavy lifting on implementation — my job was knowing my own operations well enough to know what I actually needed automated versus what I thought I needed automated. Those are different lists.
What it handles day to day:
- Email triage across all 25 mailboxes — classifies, summarizes, flags what needs action, quarantines spam
- CRM sync — new contacts flow from GoHighLevel to Microsoft 365 automatically
- Financial monitoring — Plaid pulls transactions, anomalies surface as tasks
- Task management — creates tasks from email, calendar, and voice agents without me touching anything
- Knowledge retrieval — 300+ entries: credentials, policy numbers, serial numbers, processes
- Infrastructure management — Cloudflare DNS, worker deploys, R2 storage on command
- SMS and callback routing — branded confirmations per company when leads call in
- Document processing — scan a receipt or contract, JARVIS extracts the key facts
- Pre-meeting briefs — before any client call, everything I know about who I'm meeting
What it costs
The full stack runs about $150 a month. Cloudflare, Supabase, a Hostinger VPS for eight Ghost blog publications, Anthropic API, GoHighLevel, Resend, EZTexting. That's it.
For context: I was either paying for or seriously considering a fractional EA (~$800/mo), a part-time marketing coordinator (~$400/mo), and additional automation tools (~$150/mo). That's $1,300–$1,500/month in costs I haven't needed to pull the trigger on.
The honest version
JARVIS didn't eliminate the need for those functions. It moved the ceiling on what I can manage alone before those functions become necessary. That's a meaningful distinction and I want to be clear about it. The ceiling moved. It didn't disappear.
What I didn't expect was the cognitive overhead reduction. I expected time savings. What I got was something different — I stopped carrying the weight of everything I hadn't done yet, because the system was either handling it or surfacing it at the right time. That's the real leverage.
The things I haven't solved: anything that requires genuine judgment about client relationships, priority calls between the companies, or reading a room. Those stay with me. No amount of automation changes that.
Where this goes
I built this for myself. But the system is real, it runs a real portfolio, and through Noevant I'm building toward making it available to other operators — either as a custom build or a productized version. If you're running a portfolio of businesses without back-office headcount and want to talk through what this could look like for your operation, reach out at jesse@2057hldgs.com.
