A fractional AI and technology practice for San Diego small businesses and nonprofits. Strategic guidance from a Big Four background. Production systems built, deployed, and maintained by the same person who scoped them. No hand-offs. No subcontracting roulette.
Most small organizations are surrounded by AI hype and have no one they trust to translate it into action. Generic agencies sell them websites. Enterprise consultants ignore them. Offshore developers can't navigate their operations.
Forristal Consulting is the alternative — a local, senior, technically fluent advisor who can run the discovery meeting, write the SQL, ship the mobile app, and explain the result back to a board. One person. Outcomes you can point at.
A short sprint to land the relationship. A custom build to deliver the high-value system. A monthly retainer to convert delivery into ongoing leadership. Each one is fixed-scope, transparently priced, and designed to create a clean path to the next.
Three weeks. Two to three deployed automations. A written audit of where AI and automation can save real time or money in your operation — and the working systems to prove it.
A web and mobile system that replaces email chains, spreadsheets, and the heroic operations volunteer with a single integrated workflow — built in the pattern proven at Veteran Sailing.
Senior technology leadership on a predictable monthly cadence. For organizations too small for a full-time CTO and too important to wing it. Three-tier structure shaped to your surface area.
Veteran Sailing is a 501(c)(3) San Diego nonprofit running sailing programs for veterans. Like most early-stage nonprofits, it operates with a small staff, volunteer-dependent program delivery, and a coordination problem that never sits still — matching volunteer availability, participant interest, charter-company boats, and weather windows for every event.
As founder, I designed and shipped its complete operating infrastructure: a custom volunteer-availability survey and email questionnaire system, a magic-link confirmation workflow that closes charter reservations without accounts or passwords, native iOS and Android participant apps, a staff admin console, the marketing site on Wix, and the underlying GCP Firebase and App Hosting deployment with GitHub-based CI/CD.
The same pattern — explicit lifecycle modeling, magic-link auth, lightweight GCP backend, native mobile where engagement matters — adapts to any program-coordination organization in roughly six to eight weeks. Veteran Sailing is not a side project. It is the prototype.
Marine Corps infantryman. Four years active duty, 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit, deployments to the Mediterranean and Persian Gulf, and Operation Unified Response — humanitarian operations in Haiti following the 2010 earthquake. Inactive Secret Clearance.
Big Four and senior analytics consultant. Technology consultant at Ernst & Young supporting financial services. Senior Business Analyst at Axos Bank leading data analytics across consumer lending. Senior Consultant at Cotality (formerly CoreLogic) building automated catastrophe modeling pipelines that reduced project lead times by over 95%.
Builder. Native iOS and Android development, custom web services on GCP, advanced SQL and Python, full CI/CD on GitHub. Founded Veteran Sailing and shipped its complete technology stack — apps, backend, admin console, automation, brand, 501(c)(3) filing, trademark application — solo.
The combination is the point. Most AI consultants are either operators who can't build, or builders who can't run a discovery meeting. This practice does both, for organizations that need both and can't pay enterprise rates for either.
Every engagement ends with something running in production. The only acceptable deliverable for "AI strategy" is the AI doing the thing. Slides are a means to align on what gets built next, never the work itself.
Sprint and Build engagements are fixed-fee. Retainers are tiered and transparent. You will never receive a surprise invoice. Out-of-scope work is scoped as a new engagement before it begins.
The person who scopes the work is the person who builds it. No bait-and-switch to junior staff. No subcontracting roulette. If a specialist is needed, that is named upfront and managed transparently.
You own the code at completion. Your team gets trained on the systems we build together. Your CI/CD lives in your GitHub. Your data lives in your cloud account. No lock-in. Your house, your keys.
