AI implementation · Central Iowa

Identify problems. Find solutions.

I use modern technology to help small and medium businesses save time, save money, and put better work in front of their customers.

30min no charge
Gibson Rivas, with the MadeTime robot standing on his head
Gibson Rivas Founder, MadeTime Co
Mechanical Engineering, Iowa State University
Minor in Sales Engineering
Who am I?

Hi, I'm Gibson, founder of MadeTime Co. I work with small and medium businesses that don't have the resources to hire an entire AI implementation team. I help identify where these tools drive real business value or solve genuinely painful problems, then train your team on safe, proper use so everyone's comfortable with it. Below, you can see some of my core methods and past projects.

Certificate of Achievement awarded to
            Gibson Rivas by Ames National Laboratory and Iowa State University Department
            of Computer Science, Pathway Summer School: Data Science and AI Workshop for
            Energy Solutions, June 2024
Ames National Laboratory & Iowa State University, Dept. of Computer Science: Data Science and AI, U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science, June 2024.
Schedule a call Past projects
The MadeTime mascot, a kid riding a walking robot, rendered in halftone dots

AI is a tool, not the solution.

You're hiring me to save time, save money, and put better work in front of your customers. AI is unusually good at that, with real leverage and marginal cost once it's built. It is still not the right answer to everything. When the best fix for your business doesn't involve AI, that's the fix I'll bring you. I don't work for a software or AI company, I don't partner with one, and I don't take a cut of what you buy. Nothing about my answer depends on what you end up using.

How I work

Find it. Test it. Teach it.

Same three steps, same order, every time. Step two is the one that can end the project, and that is exactly why it comes second.

How I work, in three steps Two lenses overlap: painful problems and the constraint. The overlap is the sweet spot. Pick one problem from it and test whether AI can do it better, faster, cheaper, proven on your real work. Yes leads to more time, more money, better output, run by your own people. No loops back underneath to pick the next candidate. STEP 1FIND THE CONSTRAINT STEP 2TEST IT AGAINST AI STEP 3IMPLEMENT AND EDUCATE Painful problems repetitive · boring time-consuming · error-prone → less pain The constraint the one bottleneck capping your output → more money the sweet spot pick one Can AI do it better · faster · cheaper? proven on your real work, not a demo yes no More time More money Better output your people running it, not me Sometimes the answer is no. Then we pick the next candidate.
STEP 1

Find the constraint

We start with one hour and one job, walked end to end: the phone call, the quote, the work, the invoice. I mark every place it sits and waits, and it is often the same short list: the quote that takes three days because one person prices everything, the inbox nobody opens until Friday, the spreadsheet somebody retypes out of a PDF every Monday. Most of that is just painful. One of them is setting how much work you get out the door, and we name that one together, in plain terms, before anything gets built.

Most shops already know which one it is. They just have not said it out loud.

STEP 2

Test it against AI

Then we point the tools at your real work: your own quotes, your actual PDFs, the ugly ones with handwriting in the margin. Can they do it better, faster, cheaper, and reliably enough to trust? The bar is simple: if checking the output takes about as long as doing the work yourself, it failed. I would rather find that out before you pay for a build than after.

Sometimes the answer is no, and then we test the next candidate on the list. If none of them hold up, I say so and walk.

STEP 3

Implement and educate

I build it into the work you already do: your forms, your quotes, your files, your inbox, not a chatbot bolted on the side. Then I sit with the people who use it until they can run it, tell when it is wrong, and change it themselves. The point isn't a tool you own. It's a capability that stays in the building.

If you never call me again, the thing still runs on Monday.

Why it works

The thinking comes from Goldratt's Theory of Constraints: every business has one bottleneck that sets its pace, and improvement anywhere else mostly evaporates. What makes AI different is what happens to the time it frees: automate the repetitive work and those hours can be reapplied directly at the constraint. That only works if your people are free to move to it, and when they are not, you get productivity slop: one team going faster and the business shipping exactly the same amount. Speed anywhere else is just motion; speed at the constraint is growth.

The guarantee

I'm not done when it's built. I'm done when your people can run it without me. If they can't, I'm still working. No extra charge.

Most AI projects don't fail because the technology doesn't work. They fail because it gets built, handed over, and never used. So I don't define "done" as delivered. I define it as your team running it without me.

This holds as long as you give me one person to work with: a couple of hours a week through the build and handoff.

Where every project starts

Start with the audit.

"You know your business. I know what these tools can actually do. The audit is where those two meet. I walk your operation end to end, name the one thing capping your output, and tell you straight whether new technology can touch it, including when the answer is no."

The free thirty minute call comes first. The audit is the first paid step, and nothing gets built before it.

You walk away with

  • Your constraint, named in plain terms
  • An honest yes or no on whether AI can touch it
  • Two or three specific candidates, not a vague roadmap
  • Live demos of real tools, not slides
  • One page to keep, whoever you hire

What I get

  • An understanding of how your business actually runs
  • Where your constraints are
  • Where new technology can be applied, and where it can't

The honest no is part of the deal. If your constraint is something AI can't touch, I'll say so plainly and we stop there. You'll still have a clear map of where your own work gets stuck, which is worth having either way.

Past projects.

Construction and HVAC

Revit data normalizer into selection

n8n

Equipment schedules get flattened into PDFs and everyone downstream recounts them by hand. This takes the structured export, turns it into a clean equipment list, and runs it down two selection paths, every line tracing back to a source row. Tested on a 712 piece hospital schedule.

Nameplate reader into replacement selection

n8n · Gemini · web app

Photograph the nameplate on an old rooftop unit. It reads the plate, finds the manufacturer's published specs, and lines them up against the replacement catalog with a reason for each option, flagging refrigerant changes and curb mismatches, then writing a handoff file.

Controls scope from plan packs

n8n · Gemini · Claude

A full plan and spec set goes in and a controls scope comes out, every item carrying the page and sentence supporting it; anything unsupported goes to review instead of into the scope. Certified against a working estimator's real scope on a real project: zero differences, except one counting question the documents themselves leave open.

Healthcare

Candidate sourcing for clinical roles

Claude · NPPES registry · PowerShell

An addiction treatment clinic needed counselors and nurses in a market where licensing registries publish names but not contact information. The agent queried a public federal provider database across ten cities and seven credential types: about 800 names, shortlist of 46. A person sends every message.

Founding-executive search for a nonprofit clinic

Claude · Firecrawl · public filings

A nonprofit behavioral health startup needed a founding director it could afford, and public filings publish what every nonprofit executive actually earns. Scored 2,495 people from public records down to ten verified finalists whose current pay fits, each backed by the filing it came from.

University purchasing

State tax exemption verifier

Claude · Tavily · Firecrawl

A large organization publishes a matrix of where it holds sales tax exemption. The agent verified all 51 jurisdictions against primary sources, recording the status, supporting quote, and link for each row. Anything that disagreed with the published matrix, or that public record could not settle, went to a review queue instead of into the result. Delivered as a cited spreadsheet.

University research

Machine learning model for dementia prediction

Python · pandas

A university research project predicting dementia from patient data. Most of the real work was the unglamorous half: cleaning the dataset until it could be trusted, then training and comparing logistic regression and random forest classifiers.

Marketing and brand

Logo and brand system

OpenAI gpt-image-2 · Claude

The mark at the top of this page: a script generates a batch, a reviewing pass culls and refines over rounds, and the winning mark was rebuilt by hand as clean vector geometry. Twelve out of twelve final generations spelled the wordmark correctly.

Testing and trust

Calibration rig

n8n · Claude · OpenAI

Before an AI step gets trusted, it runs against known-correct cases with two graders, one on the answer and one on the reasoning, because the dangerous failure is a right answer reached for a wrong reason. Rules that survive get hardened into ordinary code that no longer needs the model at all.

On my own

Personal assistant

n8n · OpenAI · Telegram

I text a bot in plain language and it manages my reminders. "Remind me to call Marcus Tuesday at 3" becomes a dated card on my dashboard, and I can ask what is on my list or say which ones are done.

Morning email triage

Claude · Gmail

Twice a day a routine reads my inbox and decides which emails actually need a reply from me, with a standing rule that urgency claimed by a marketer is not urgency. What's left lands on one morning page.

Job-posting lead scanner

n8n · Apify · Claude

Runs every morning at 7am: scans admin-role job postings within 30 miles, scores each business against four qualifying gates, and emails a digest. Last full run: 46 fetched, 42 scored and emailed in 134 seconds.

Lead finder and qualifier

Claude · Tavily · Perplexity · Firecrawl

Give it a city and it builds a list of businesses worth walking into, screening for whether the decision maker is reachable and whether there is a visible sign of the problem I solve. Last run returned 39 ranked targets.

Fit

Who this is for.

Probably you, if

  • You run a small business, roughly 5 to 50 people
  • The work piles up on your best people and you can't hire your way out
  • You're in Central Iowa and prefer someone who shows up in person

Not for

  • Enterprises: you already have this person, and that's the point
  • Businesses whose constraint AI can't touch. I'll tell you that on the call, free
Thirty minutes, no charge

Pick a time that works.

Grab any open slot. Thirty minutes, no charge. I'll ask what's slowing you down, give you a straight answer on whether AI can touch it, and walk you through how I work. I confirm every request myself, usually the same day. No automated sequence.

The deeper work, a full constraint audit and training your people in person, is a separate paid piece. We can talk about it on the call.

gibson@madetimeco.com (515) 803-3920

August 2026
Open 30 minute call times, Monday to Friday, Central time

All times Central

None of these times work? gibson@madetimeco.com or (515) 803-3920

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