Technology & Automation for Rural Small Businesses

Four Wednesday evenings that end with working tools in your business, not a folder of notes.

Built for people who run logging jobs, mills, trucks and forestry practices — and who have no interest in learning software for its own sake. We skip the jargon and go straight to the things that give you back an hour a day.

Apply for a seat

Takes about two minutes. Free for accepted businesses, and enrollment is capped.

The particulars

Dates

September 9, 16, 23 and 30, 2026 — four Wednesdays

Time

7:00 PM Eastern

Where

Live video, from your office, kitchen table or truck

Cost

Free for accepted participants

After

Two weeks of private coaching, one business at a time

Bring

A laptop, and the files you actually work from

Six weeks end to end: four live sessions, then the coaching window. Each session is a live walk-through — you watch the setup happen on screen and build the same thing on your own machine as we go.

What we do, week by week

Every session is a demonstration you follow along with, step by step. You finish the evening with the thing actually built on your own computer — not a list of things to try later. Nothing here costs money to keep using.

Sept 9Wednesday

Personalized AI and workflows

Most people give up on AI because it does not know anything about their business. Fix that first. You will write a single plain-text instruction file — your habits, your operating rules, how you want a bid letter to sound, what your crew is called — and hand it to the model at the start of every task.

After this session you stop re-explaining your business every time you open a chat window.

Tools: any current large language model, plus one Markdown file you own

Sept 16Wednesday

Records and reference hubs

Stop digging through folders for the deed, the timber sale contract, the insurance certificate or the spec sheet you know you saved. We build a reference hub from your own documents that you can question in plain English — and that answers with the source page attached, so you can check it.

Good for contracts, deeds, permits, maintenance records and anything else you need to find in front of a landowner.

Tools: Google NotebookLM and a tidy folder

Sept 23Wednesday

The content studio

Turn the documents you already have into the ones you keep meaning to write. Client proposals. Written operating procedures. A hazard briefing for a new site. A training guide for the hire who starts Monday.

The raw material is already on your drive. This session is about getting it out in a form you can hand to somebody.

Tools: your existing files, and the setup from weeks one and two

Sept 30Wednesday

Web pages and apps at no cost

Publish a real business web page — your own domain, no monthly bill, no website company. Then take the spreadsheet you actually run the business on and turn it into a working phone or desktop tool your crew can use in the field.

This is the session people are surprised by. You do not need to know how to code.

Tools: free static hosting, and whatever spreadsheet you already use

Then two weeks inside your own operation

The cohort is the easy part. What usually breaks down is the week after, when everybody goes back to work and the new habit dies.

So every participating business gets private, individual sessions with Dr. Steven Bick after the four evenings are done — to design a technology stack around your files, your crew and your numbers, and then actually put it in place.

That is the difference between a course you attended and a change you kept.

Who this is for

Logging contractors

Sawmills

Truckers

Consulting foresters

Wood products owners

No technical background is assumed and none is needed. If you already run a business with a phone and a spreadsheet, you have everything this course builds on. Come with one job you are tired of doing by hand.