Joseph Rispoli
Full disclosure: I wasn’t job hunting

I run businesses with AI.

I came to your site as a design reference for a creative web build I’ve been working on, and found this role instead. I run the operating layer of a seven-figure professional services firm essentially alone, on systems I designed and built, with AI at every layer. This is the job I already do, at the place I’d rather do it.

Three minutes of proof in the video; the evidence below: the firm I operate, the small business I turned into a growth lab, the systems I’ve shipped, and the operating system I’d build at LCA in my first 90 days.

Exhibit A — The day job

A law firm is an agency with different fonts.

What it isNationwide corporate law firm, 17 fee-earning attorneys, fully remote
My roleCOO & systems builder: delivery, technology, talent, finance ops, growth
The ops teamMe, a part-time resource, and an offshore EA

A remote corporate law firm runs on the same physics as a design agency. Client work delivered on deadline. Engagements scoped and staffed. Dozens of concurrent matters, from one-off projects to multi-year relationships. Hundreds of invoices a month, run calm. I operate one at a ratio most operators wouldn’t attempt: seventeen producers, one operating layer, built and run by me with AI doing the work of a department. That ratio isn’t heroics; it’s architecture. Building scalable process is my core competency. At DBM, when something works twice it becomes a playbook, and when it works three times it becomes a system.

The model is LCA’s pod model in miniature. Each attorney is a business within the business, with their own clients, book, and P&L. That flips the org chart. The playbooks, the SOPs, and the DataHub (the firm-wide workflow platform our outside CTO engineered, with me as his integral partner) aren’t back-office support. They’re the product. I translate business needs and workflow-optimization opportunities into the features he builds, and as AI coding tools have matured, I increasingly carry pieces of the build myself. My internal customers are seventeen entrepreneurs, and what we ship them is the operating system they run on.

The growth engine is mine too. I personally recruited every attorney behind the expansion, built the systems that gave the firm capacity to absorb it, and meet biweekly with each attorney on growing their book: headcount expansion × revenue-per-attorney expansion. The governance credential is hard-earned. I deployed AI inside attorney-client privilege, a stricter environment than any design agency will ever face.

17
Fee-earning attorneys recruited, resourced, and supported
~1.5
People running the entire operating layer, with AI
Growth in three years of the practice I operate and drive*
+76%
This year’s pace, after +57% and +47% the two years prior*

*Excluding the founding partner’s own book, the honest proxy for my impact. I fence my own numbers; you should want an operator who does.

“Operations is hospitality at scale. The system is how you care for people when you can’t be in the room.”

That’s the discipline underneath everything above: every call answered, every quote followed up, every invoice on time, a standing care rhythm with all seventeen. Four years serving attorneys and NYC building owners, the two least forgiving client bases in America.

Exhibit B — The builder proof

The small-business growth lab.

The vehicleA 1968 family trade business with zero digital infrastructure
My roleDemand, systems, and delivery. Everything except the wrench
ConstraintNights & weekends, solo, AI at every layer

A traditional small business plus AI leverage: the exact thesis Greg writes about, executed end to end. It started with no website worth the name, no paid acquisition, no field-service software, no review engine. I built the whole growth machine myself while running the firm above. An organic engine around NYC compliance work, an ad campaign engineered with AI, and the operations layer to deliver what the demand engine catches.

14.2%
Ad click-through rate on violation-driven search, against a ~6% industry average
$7
Cost per click, engineered down in a $15–30-per-click market
10×
Search impressions in four months, the organic engine compounding
~4 mo
From zero digital infrastructure to a full operating system, solo
Demand engine
Built with AI, tuned by hand
Site rebuilt as an organic engine around NYC violation and inspection work: high-margin, urgency-driven searches. Google Ads running at 2.4× the industry click-through at a fraction of market cost per click.
Delivery layer
The office, systematized
Jobber end-to-end, AI call screening, review engine, quote follow-up system. Every call answered, every quote chased, every job invoiced. Where small businesses leak money, sealed.

Exhibit C — Selected builds

Systems I’ve shipped.

A sample of the operating infrastructure I’ve built or driven. Each one replaced a manual process, a vendor, or a guess.

Partnership build · Flagship
DBM DataHub
The firm-wide operational workflow system, intake to delivery to billing, engineered by our outside CTO with me as the ops half of the partnership. I surface the workflow-optimization opportunities, translate business needs into the features he builds, and increasingly contribute code myself as AI tools have evolved. The JD calls this “reusable IP.” It’s how a 1.5-person ops layer serves seventeen producers.
Recruiting asset · Live
Attorney economics calculator
An interactive model that shows a solo attorney their per-billable-hour economics inside the firm. Levers and vectors, not a pitch deck. AI-built, shipped in a day.
joindbm.com/calculator →
Internal tool
Outlook time-entry dashboard
A full-stack dashboard running time-entry management on top of Outlook: capture, matter suggestions, edit flows, reporting. Replaced a weekly manual chase across the firm.
Productized service · Live
Back Office Blueprint
I saw an underserved market, blue-collar business owners running seven-figure operations with no back office, and productized the playbook I’d already proven into back-office-as-a-service. Proposals ship as AI-built interactive micro-sites, like this page.
backofficebp.com →
Agent system
OpenClaw → Claude-first
Built my own agent system the week OpenClaw launched: model-routing lanes, persistent memory, scheduled heartbeats running real ops workflows. Then deliberately replaced it with a Claude-first setup once I’d pressure-tested both. I adopt at the frontier, test in production, and standardize on what holds up.
In build · Live site
DBM Core
The business-within-a-business model, productized: a turnkey platform for independent corporate attorneys who want to scale without giving up control. I designed, built, and shipped the site. The platform behind it is in build.
dbm-core.com →

The stack: systems I run daily

OpenAI Anthropic Claude Code Perplexity Grok Obsidian Notion Zapier Make n8n Clio Jobber

The crosswalk

What you’re asking for. What I’ve done.

The job description, synthesized. Each ask against the closest thing I’ve already built or run.

Serve dozens of concurrent clients, from 30-day sprints to multi-year partnerships.
Dozens of concurrent matters at DBM, from one-off engagements to multi-year clients, resourced and tracked and billed by a ~1.5-person operating layer. Hundreds of invoices a month, run calm.
Resource capacity forecasting and planning, with team health at the center.
Staffing and utilization across seventeen attorney books, plus a biweekly 1:1 rhythm with every producer. Capacity planning that keeps the people in the plan.
Delivery rituals, playbooks, and knowledge systems. Reuse brilliance, don’t reinvent work.
At DBM the playbooks and the DataHub are the product my internal customers run on; Back Office Blueprint is the same playbook, packaged and sold to an entire market.
Operationalize client experience and hospitality as a systematic discipline.
I run operations as an extension of customer service. My seventeen attorneys are clients too. I use the sales instincts built over a decade to learn how each one needs to be served, and white-glove is the standard for them and for the firm’s clients alike.
Security, compliance, and responsible AI governance for enterprise and regulated clients.
I deployed AI inside attorney-client privilege and trained top-tier attorneys to use it. A stricter governance environment than any enterprise design client will demand.
Core partner to the CEO, translating vision into execution and operational clarity.
COO to a founding partner for four years: translate the vision, build the system that delivers it, and hand back leadership focus. The DataHub partnership with our outside CTO is that exact motion, shipped.

The actual pitch

My first 90 days at Late Checkout

Mapped to the role: delivery operations, resourcing, client experience, risk visibility, AI governance. Built as systems that scale, not organigrams that suffocate, and built for where you’re going: AI as the team’s sidekick today, agents running more of the operation tomorrow, with governance fit for clients like Dropbox, Grammarly, and Salesforce.

Days 0–30

Map the machine

Shadow every delivery pod. Interview every lead. Trace three client engagements end to end: close to kickoff to delivery to invoice. Audit the tool stack and where the data actually lives. No process changes yet; operators who “fix” things in week two break things they don’t understand.

Ship → A complete operating map, a risk & health register, and 3–5 zero-friction quick wins.

Days 31–60

Systematize delivery

Standardize the delivery lifecycle: rituals, playbooks, definitions of done. Build the resourcing and capacity-forecasting model so staffing decisions stop being vibes. Design client onboarding as a product, because first impressions are an operations problem wearing a design costume.

Ship → V1 operating cadence, capacity forecast model, onboarding system.

Days 61–90

Automate & govern

Layer AI into the operating system itself: a delivery-health agent reading project signals before humans feel the problem, meeting→task→status automation, staffing forecasts from utilization history, an AI onboarding concierge, and the internal agent library. Stand up AI governance covering what we automate, what stays human, and how client data is protected, so the agency practices what it sells.

Ship → Live ops dashboards, automated reporting, AI governance framework v1.

Why here, specifically

Why Late Checkout

I’ve followed Greg’s work for years, long before this role existed. The honest version of how I got here: I was pulling the LCA site as a design reference for a creative build of my own, saw this role, and couldn’t not apply. I believe in the model, I think Greg understands where the world is going and what it takes to win in the AI era, and I’d like to build the operating system underneath that.

The thesis I’ve bet my career on is the one LCA embodies: a small team with taste, AI leverage, and real systems can out-build organizations ten times its size. I’ve proven it three times: inside a law firm, inside a 58-year-old family trade business, and as a solo founder. I’m not job hunting, and I’m not optimizing for comp or title. This is the one role I’d rearrange things for.

“Most operators protect the process. The good ones protect the people and the promise, then build the process to serve both.”

Based in Connecticut (EST), fully remote-ready, available now.