Fractional Chief AI and Automation Officer for your business
I own AI and automation inside your company. Most people in this seat write the strategy. I also build the systems.
How AI gets bought when nobody owns it
Someone on the team reads that you are behind on AI. They buy a tool. It works for a month. Then the person who set it up gets busy, or leaves, and it quietly breaks. Nobody notices for a while.
Twelve months later you are paying for thirty subscriptions and two AI seats per employee. The CRM does not talk to the invoicing system. A chatbot answers questions nobody asked. Your ops manager still re-types data from one screen into another every Friday.
That is the cost of AI without an owner. The tools are fine. The problem is that no one is responsible for the whole picture, and no one is measuring what any of it returns.
What a Fractional Chief AI Officer does here
- Maps the work Every repeated task across sales, delivery, finance and support. What it costs in hours. What it costs when it goes wrong.
- Owns the roadmap One prioritized list of what gets built, in what order, and what each item is worth. Reviewed monthly with you.
- Picks the tools Which model, which platform, which vendor, and which of your data any of them may touch. Decided once, by someone who has used all of them, so your team stops evaluating.
- Gets it built Either by directing your team and vendors, or by my own hands and my delivery bench. Depends on the package.
- Reports the return Hours removed. Errors removed. Headcount you did not have to hire. One page, every month.
Who this is for
Service businesses
Agencies, trades, professional services, field service, logistics. Companies that sell people's time and want to sell more of it.
$1M to $50M revenue
Big enough that manual work is now a real cost line. Too small to justify a $400K executive who only thinks about this.
An owner still in the weeds
You know which parts of the business run on you personally. You want them to run without you, and you want it done this year.
The first 90 days
- Days 1 to 14
Audit
I sit with your team and watch how the work actually happens. I inventory every tool you pay for. You get a written map of where the hours go.
- Days 15 to 30
Roadmap
A ranked list of automations with the estimated saving on each. We agree on the first three. I cancel the subscriptions you do not need.
- Days 31 to 90
First three live
The first three automations run in production with your team trained on them. You get the first monthly report showing what changed.
What clients say about working with me
I worked with Valerian on a full automation build for my companies. His work has significantly reduced manual tasks and improved the accuracy and speed in our operations. Highly recommend to any business looking to automate its operations.
Valerian is the guy, that when you find him, you keep him around, for life.
More reviews on Clutch and Upwork, where I hold Top Rated Plus with a 100% job success score.
Two ways to work with me
Advisor
I own the decisions. Your team, your freelancers or your agency build.
$6,500per month
Decisions and direction. No building.
- Audit and 90-day roadmap in month one
- Biweekly working session with you
- Direct Slack access, replies within a business day
- Tool and vendor selection
- Review of everything your builders ship
- Monthly one-page return report
Owner
I own the decisions, and my agency builds them.
$12,500per month
Everything in Advisor, plus the building, delivered by me and the engineers at 2V Automation.
- Everything in Advisor
- The roadmap built, by me and the 2V Automation engineers
- A seat in your leadership meeting
- I manage your automation vendors and contractors
- Maintenance of everything we build
- Hiring support if you bring automation in-house
About me
I'm Valerian. I graduated with honors in automated computer control systems in 2010. The degree was about the things this job still turns on: how to collect real business requirements, and how to build software that stays reliable and maintainable after the person who wrote it moves on.
Fifteen years of running businesses came on top of that. That part taught me which questions to ask an owner, and where efficiency actually turns into growth rather than just a tidier process.
I run two agencies. 2V Automation is an n8n Certified Expert Partner that builds automation for founder-led service businesses, and it is the delivery bench behind the Owner package. Shila is an AI-automated SEO agency. Running both is why a conversation with me starts at payroll, margin and the hire you are about to make, rather than at tooling.
I am also building FieldClients, signal-based lead sourcing for US field service companies. It reads public records every day, permits, violations, inspection filings and registrations, matches each signal to the business account behind it, and verifies the decision-maker before anything is sent. Every lead carries a verified decision-maker email, plus the company phone where one is listed, and seats are capped per trade and per market, so each signal goes to exactly one member. The interesting part is the matching: a permit record and a company record almost never agree on the name, the address or the legal entity, and most of the engineering sits in that join. Some of the research behind it is public, including a guide to building permit data by state.
The client work behind that has been for founder-led service businesses in the US, Europe and Australia, now with AI models doing the parts that used to need a person.
The fractional role exists because of a pattern I kept seeing. Agencies build what they are asked to build and leave. The client is left with workflows nobody owns. I wanted to sit on the other side of the table, inside the company, accountable for the result over time.
I work from Lisbon on US hours. I write Headcount-Free Growth, a newsletter for founders about growing output without growing the team, and I publish automation teardowns on YouTube.
- 2010 graduated with honors, automated computer control systems
- 50k views automation teardowns on YouTube
- 700+ readers of Headcount-Free Growth
- 15 years running and leading businesses
- 2 agencies 2V Automation and Shila, both still running
- $1M+ delivered through Upwork, Top Rated Plus, 100% job success
- n8n Certified Expert Partner
- 3 regions clients across the US, EU and Australia
Questions founders ask
How is this different from hiring an AI agency or consultant?
Chief AI Officer or Chief Automation Officer?
Which tools do you use?
Will this replace people on my team?
What happens to the automations if we stop working together?
Do you work with companies outside the US?
Let's find out if your company needs an automation owner.
A 30-minute call. I'll ask about the parts of the business that still run on you. You'll leave with a clear yes or no, and two things to fix either way.