A real answer, not a receipt
Your note lands in a working inbox and comes back answered by the person who would do the work. No drip sequence, no discovery deck, no handoff to an account manager who has to go ask someone else.
Get in touch
Let’s build something together.
Every message on this page goes straight to Forrest Surprenant, and you get a reply within one business day, Monday through Friday. Below is what happens after you send it, which channel fits your question, and what to put in a first message so the answer comes back worth reading.
Send a message
After you send
What happens after I reach out?
Every message reaches Forrest Surprenant directly, not a queue or an intake team. NLMA replies within one business day, Monday through Friday, with either a straight answer, a clarifying question, or a suggested time to talk. If the work is not a fit, you get told that in the first reply rather than three calls later.
One call to map it
If there is something worth building, we run a single scoping call covering the problem, the outcome, and what gets built first. A written scope follows within 48 hours, so you can price it and rank it against everything else on your plate.
Working software, early
Delivery is staged in real environments instead of saved for a launch day. You see the system running while changes are still cheap, and the code and infrastructure stay in accounts you own when the engagement ends.
Pick a channel
Should I book a paid consult or just send a message?
Send a message when you are scoping a project, comparing approaches, or not yet sure what you need built. Book a paid consult when you want dedicated advisory time on a specific problem plus a decision you can act on this week. Both routes reach the same person, so start with whichever costs you less time.
Use the form or email
New builds, integrations, a stack audit, or a second opinion on a build-versus-buy decision. Free, and the fastest way to find out whether this is a fit at all. Write to info@nlma.io or use the form above.
Book time on the consults page
Advisory time on a problem you have already defined: an architecture review, a build-versus-buy call, an audit of a stack that keeps breaking. You pick the time, describe the problem, and see the amount before your card is involved.
Start at the tools page
Questions about the platforms NLMA runs in production, or about a referral perk on one of them, are answered on the referrals page. If you are a vendor pitching a product, say so plainly in the first line and you will get a plain answer back.
Reply on the existing thread
NLMA stays engaged after launch, so monitoring questions, incidents, and feature additions run through the thread you already have. For anything urgent, the phone number on this page is the fastest path.
Before you book a paid consult: time is billed at $450 per hour in 15-minute increments. Your card is authorized when you book rather than charged, and it is captured afterward only for the time actually spent. Calls default to Google Meet, Forrest confirms the time by email, and a free intro call is available if you would rather start there.
Write a useful first message
What should I include in my first message?
Four things make a reply useful: the systems you run today, the part of the job that is still manual, what it looks like when the process breaks, and your rough timeline. With those, NLMA can usually tell you in a single reply whether you are looking at a build, a buy, or a much smaller fix.
What you already run
List the platforms of record and the places data actually lives, including the spreadsheet nobody admits to. Half of this work is connecting tools that were never designed to talk to each other, so the list is the real starting point.
Guesty
DoorLoop
Baselane
Turno
QuickBooks Online
Google Workspace
Twilio
DocuSeal
n8n
Spreadsheets
What breaking looks like
Describe the failure, not the feature you imagine fixing it. A missed turnover, a reconciliation that eats a Friday, an owner statement that goes out wrong once a quarter. Concrete failures scope faster than abstract wish lists.
What NLMA takes on, and what it does not
The work is operations, software, and applied AI, concentrated in real estate and property management: internal tools, owner and customer portals, APIs and data pipelines, LLM workflows, Model Context Protocol servers, and the integration layer between platforms that do not natively connect.
What NLMA will not do is build something a shipping product already handles. Build versus buy is part of the engagement, so if a platform on the market covers your case, you get told to buy it. Nothing is outsourced offshore, and everything built ends up self-hosted in accounts you control.
Where we work
Do you work with clients outside Virginia?
Yes. NLMA is based in Luray, Virginia, and works with clients across the United States. Engagements run remotely by default: video calls on Google Meet, staged environments you can log into, and code you can pull down yourself. Working hours are Monday through Friday, Eastern time.
Remote is the default because the work is remote by nature. The systems live on servers, the platforms are cloud platforms, and the reconciliation that hurts is happening in a browser tab, not on a job site. If a project genuinely needs someone in the room, say so in your first message and we will sort it out.