A small firm, on purpose.
The person who assesses your business is the person who builds it — and the person who answers the phone in month six.
David Stehlik
Seven years as a Marine Corps non-commissioned officer, then twenty years spent making financial and operational processes run better — at a Cleveland medical device manufacturer, in a business of his own, and inside the Department of Defense, where he has led ERP modernization and automation work involving hundreds of requirements and dozens of contract staff.
The through-line is the same at every size. Find the work people are doing by hand, and take it off their plate.
- MBA, Cleveland State University
- BA Finance, Baldwin Wallace University
- Certified Defense Financial Manager (CDFM)
- Lean Six Sigma Green Belt
- United States Marine Corps, 2004–2011
Enterprise experience, small-business judgment.
He's automated at scale
Led AI strategy and adoption across Navy financial operations, putting OCR and document processing, data normalization, and chatbots into production.
He's implemented systems
Stood up an ERP at a Cleveland manufacturer three months ahead of schedule, and trained every department on it. Adoption was the hard part.
He's owned a small business
Has owned and run his own company — payroll, customers, slow months and all. Which is why Fivefold doesn't lead with technology.
The questions you were going to ask anyway.
Is this going to replace my people?
Not in the work we take on. We start with the jobs nobody wanted — retyping, form-filling, reformatting the same document twice.
What happens to my data?
Business-tier accounts don't train on your content, and we configure them that way on purpose. You get the settings in writing.
What does it cost?
Fixed fee for the assessment. Per-project quote after that. Flat monthly retainer for support. Never open-ended hourly.
We tried ChatGPT and it didn't stick.
Usually the story. Handing people a chat box isn't implementation — it has to point at a specific job someone already hates.
You're a small firm.
Yes. That means senior attention on your problem, and it means we say no to work outside what we do well.
Thirty minutes, no deck.
Tell us what takes too long. If AI doesn't help, that's a useful answer too.