The Mid-Market Operator's AI Field Guide.
Written for operators running $10M to $1B companies. What to build first and how to prove it in 14 days, from someone who has been in more of these rooms than almost anyone.
Free, arrives in about a minute. Plus, get Hidden Data every week. Unsubscribe anytime.
Start here
One thing decides whether AI works for you.
No one selling it will say it. You win with one tightly-defined workflow that has a number attached, not a platform and not a moonshot. A $10M to $1B operator is lean enough that one good workflow moves the whole company. That is your edge over the billion-dollar institution that cannot move at all.
Where this comes from. Most people writing about AI for the middle market are guessing. These are the patterns I see after sitting in more than 130 real buying conversations with operators running $10M to $1B companies, across private equity, real estate, healthcare, financial services, and industrials.
What is inside
Seven pages. Two halves. No filler.
Which AI workflow to pick, and how to prove it before you spend real money.
Part one · pages 3–4
The 5 workflows worth building first
Where the money and the hours actually hide.
- Capture what lives in their headsThe judgment your best people never wrote down.
- Make your company answerableThe forty-minute dig through inboxes and drives.
- One number across every entityThe variance hiding between three systems.
- Catch what comes in the doorEvery manual re-entry, priced annually.
- Find and rank the right opportunitiesThe pipeline capped by human throughput.
Each one comes with a self-audit you can run in sixty seconds, plus what goes in, what comes out, and who in your building should own it.
Part two · pages 5–6
How to prove one in 14 days
Day by day, with tools you already have.
- Day 1Pick it, write the before-number
- 2–3Corner your data, the scrappy way
- 4–5Write the job like you would brief a new hire
- 6–8Build the transform, by hand first
- 9–10Make it repeatable
- 11–14Run it beside the human
Every step has a do-this instruction you can run the same day, ending with the two-column test for whether to kill it or build it for real.
Pick one workflow from the set, measure it, prove it in two weeks with tools you already have, and only spend real money once the number says yes. The operators who win with AI are not the ones who bet biggest. They are the ones who identified the one workflow that moves the entire business.
Who wrote it
Zach Shapiro
Founder & CEO, OutcomeCatalyst · Hidden Data, every Tuesday
Zach is the founder and CEO of OutcomeCatalyst, the shared intelligence layer for operators. He spends his weeks inside companies that already have the data they need, scattered across systems that never connect. This guide is what more than 130 of those rooms had in common, written down so you can run it yourself.
Get the field guide.
Seven pages. The 5 workflows operators build first, and the 14-day method to prove one pays before you spend real money.
Free, arrives in about a minute. Plus, get Hidden Data weekly. Unsubscribe anytime.