Harkhamer
Work,
aligned.
You acquired a business you believed in. Now you’re buried inside it.
I help owners see what’s really happening inside the business, bring the work back into alignment, and build the systems that keep it there.
The business works. You’re just not sure why — and you’re increasingly aware of the ways it doesn’t.
The person you bought it from carried half the company in their head. What’s left lives in folders, inboxes, spreadsheets, text messages, and memory.
Everyone is busy. And somehow you’re still the one who has to know where everything is, answer every question, and make sure nothing gets dropped.
You know it can grow. You may even know that better systems and AI could change what’s possible. You just don’t have six months to stop and build them.
And underneath it: you care about this place. The people. What the previous owner built. You can see what it could become — you just can’t see clearly enough from inside it to get there.
You probably don’t have a software problem.
You have a visibility problem. An ownership problem. An information-flow problem. Maybe a leadership problem. Probably several problems nobody has named yet.
Software comes later.
First, we find out what’s true.
Discovery
Harkhamer begins inside the business.
Not with a questionnaire, a software demo, or a list of things I already think you need.
I spend time where the work actually happens. I talk with the owner, interview the people doing the work, and watch how information moves — where decisions happen, what gets interrupted, what everyone works around, and what’s become so normal nobody sees it anymore.
Then I compare the business you think you have with the business that actually exists.
The result is a Findings Report: a clear, sometimes uncomfortable account of what’s working, what isn’t, what people are carrying, and what’s keeping the organization from becoming what it could be.
We find things like —
- Responsibilities that belong to nobody.
- Strong employees quietly compensating for broken systems.
- Information that exists, but not where the person who needs it can find it.
- An owner who has become part of the operating system.
And sometimes what’s holding the business back isn’t operational at all. It’s leadership.
Systems should protect good work.
One of the things I look for during Discovery is burden. Not whether people are working hard — meaningful work is often hard. I look for unnecessary burden: the weight people carry because the organization around them isn’t supporting the work they’re trying to do.
- A craftsperson constantly interrupted halfway through difficult work.
- An office manager who has quietly become the company’s memory.
- A production employee who cannot begin because information arrived incomplete.
- An owner making dozens of decisions that should never have required the owner.
Those aren’t merely inefficiencies. They’re evidence.
The purpose of a better system isn’t to squeeze more productivity out of people. It’s to create the conditions in which good people can do good work.
- “What is carrying unnecessary burden?”
- “Where has ownership disappeared?”
- “What truth has everyone learned to work around?”
That’s what Discovery is looking for.
Truth before technology.
I go where the work happens and watch what actually occurs — not what the org chart says.
Symptoms separate from causes. You see the business as it actually is.
Only then do we design the operating system the business actually needs.
Build it — then stay close enough to see what happens when it meets real life.
Because the goal was never to install software. The goal was alignment.
Then we build what the business needs.
Not another app everyone has to remember to use — a working operating system built around how the business actually runs. Every piece answers something Discovery found.
One source of truth
Every job, customer, document, and decision in one system.
You can see the work
What’s moving, waiting, late, blocked — and why.
Ownership and gates
Every stage has an owner, and can’t advance until what it needs exists.
Assignments that hold
What’s needed becomes visible, assigned, tracked, and returned to the system.
AI where it helps
It analyzes, routes, and summarizes in the background — no one becomes a prompt engineer.
Honest numbers
What work actually costs, and where margin is made or lost.
Software nobody uses is just another organizational problem.
AI changed what a small practice can build. It did not change what businesses need.
They still need judgment. They still need leadership. They still need clear information. They still need people who understand what belongs to them.
AI simply gives us an extraordinary new set of tools. Harkhamer uses those tools aggressively behind the scenes: processing interviews, analyzing operational data, finding patterns across thousands of pieces of information, building custom software, automating repetitive work, and connecting systems that previously required people to carry information between them manually.
That means a small business can now have operational infrastructure that would have required a large software team only a few years ago.
But the sequence matters. AI does not tell us what should exist. Discovery does.
The business everyone described didn’t exist.
A skilled team, a long history, an owner who believed in it — and a shop working incredibly hard while jobs ran late, information moved through back channels, and no one could reliably see the status of every job. So we spent three days inside the business. We mapped the workflow everyone described. Then we mapped the real one. They were not the same.
The workflow everyone described — clean, linear, seven steps.
Three days inside the shop. The clean line didn’t survive contact with the work.
- 7 responsibilities with no clear owner
- 3 records disagreeing about a job’s status
- Every handoff running through one person
- Jobs going invisible while actively being worked
- Ordering delayed until after drawing
- Fabric work serialized behind frame fabrication
- Kitting incomplete on roughly half of jobs
- Three scheduling records, none fully trusted
- No designed path for exceptions
Not a software proposal — a system traceable, line by line, back to what we found.
| 7 responsibilities owned by nobody | Explicit ownership on every stage |
| 3 records disagreeing on status | One job record — a single source of truth |
| Every handoff through one person | An assignment queue, tracked in the system |
| Jobs invisible while being worked | A live stage board — nothing goes dark |
| Ordering delayed until after drawing | A gate: materials ordered on approval |
| Kitting incomplete on half of jobs | A kitting check before a job can ship |
| No path for exceptions | A defined route for work that doesn’t fit |
Don’t take my word for it. See the work.
Every engagement produces tangible documents before a line of production software is written. Documents you can argue with. Maps you can correct. Findings you can test. Blueprints you can build from. The work is valuable even if Harkhamer never builds anything else for you.
Sanitized previews — select to enlarge. Real client pages are redacted before anything is shown.
You inherited more than a business.
Maybe you literally inherited it. Maybe you bought it from someone who spent thirty years carrying the whole thing in their head. Either way, you inherited customers, employees, habits, relationships, obligations, history, and a thousand decisions that made sense at some point but may no longer make sense now.
And you didn’t acquire it just to extract money from it. You saw something in it. Maybe an opportunity. Maybe a legacy worth preserving. Maybe work you genuinely believed mattered. Maybe even a calling.
Now you want to grow it without destroying the things that made it worth acquiring in the first place.
That’s who Harkhamer is built to serve.
This isn’t for everyone.
Harkhamer is probably not the right fit if you already know exactly what you want built and simply need developers to execute it.
It isn’t a good fit if you’re looking for a quick AI implementation.
It won’t work particularly well if you don’t want employees involved in understanding how the business actually operates.
And Discovery is going to be frustrating if you’ve already decided what the problem is and mainly want someone to confirm it.
The work requires curiosity. Including curiosity about whether some of the problem might be you. That’s true for every owner. It’s true for Harkhamer too.
A business is a living system.
It contains people, relationships, history, knowledge, craft, responsibility, and hope. That makes leadership more than management. It’s stewardship.
Harkhamer believes systems should help people flourish rather than simply make them faster. Technology should protect craft rather than flatten it. Growth should strengthen what is alive rather than consume it.
The bee became the symbol of that belief. It enters an ecosystem, does the work it was made to do, and leaves more life behind.
That’s the aspiration. Leave the place more alive than we found it.
I’m Christian Amondson.
I’ve spent much of my adult life building businesses, helping build other people’s businesses, studying how people make meaning, and making a fairly impressive collection of mistakes.
Some of those businesses succeeded. Some didn’t. Both taught me things I use now.
My background crosses business ownership, publishing, the humanities, marketing, systems thinking, and increasingly software development with AI. Harkhamer is where those things finally came together.
I’m particularly good at entering complicated situations, listening to a lot of people and information, finding the patterns underneath them, and helping an owner see something they couldn’t quite see from inside the business.
I don’t have a team of junior consultants. If you hire Harkhamer, you get me. That’s intentional.
The name came before the business made sense.
My grandfather Donald Clausen loved tools, boats, diesel engines, building things, and people. One of the pieces of family lore I grew up with was an old 1930 Ford flatbed truck he called Herkimer.
Years later, while trying to name this practice, that old word kept coming back. The research eventually led somewhere much more meaningful: toward the language and craft traditions of the Danish-German borderlands connected to my grandfather’s family history, and toward a name that evokes tools, makers, and people who build useful things.
Harkhamer became a way of carrying something of him into this work.
Discovery
Before we decide what to build, we find out what’s true.
A Harkhamer Discovery is an intensive examination of your business from the inside. It typically includes owner conversations, employee interviews, direct observation, workflow reconstruction, information-flow analysis, responsibility mapping, operational diagnosis, and a detailed Findings Report.
When appropriate, Discovery leads to an Operational Blueprint describing what should change and what should be built. Sometimes that becomes a substantial custom operating system. Sometimes the most important recommendation isn’t software at all.
Either way, you leave with something you probably haven’t had in a while: a clear view of your own business.
Begin a conversation
Tell me about the business.
You don’t need to know exactly what’s wrong. Tell me what you acquired, why you acquired it, what you hoped it would become, and where things feel stuck now. If I think Harkhamer can help, we’ll talk. If I don’t, I’ll tell you that too.
I read these myself. There isn’t a sales team.