Client Zero.

I don't prescribe anything I haven't taken myself.

Sanjeev Chowdhry · Notes from the practice

This month I turn seventy. I have spent forty years running businesses: manufacturing, distribution, e-commerce, events. I say that not for the birthday wishes but because it explains the rule this practice is built on: I don't prescribe anything I haven't taken myself.

So before Spring Street AI had a single client, it had Client Zero. Me.

Today I run three businesses alone. A skincare brand that manufactures overseas and sells on Amazon, an event production company, and this practice. No staff. No assistant. One person, seventy years old, and a set of AI tools that I run the way a craftsman runs a shop full of machines.

Here is what that actually looked like in one recent week. Not a demo week. A real one.

AI drafted my supplier negotiations across a time-zone gap to China, and I made every decision and sent every message. It tracked a 501-unit ocean shipment from Shanghai into Amazon's warehouse network and told me the morning the boxes checked in. It rebuilt my product photography from a factory snapshot: background removed, lighting corrected, ad mockups cut. It watched a competitor relaunch, pulled their numbers, and helped me reprice before I'd finished my coffee. And it went through my marketing card line by line with me arguing over single words, sixteen drafts of one face, because that's how I work.

Notice what's missing from that list. The AI didn't decide to double an order. It didn't feel that a supplier relationship needed warmth before a difficult ask. It didn't choose which battles were worth my hours. Judgment stayed where it belongs, with the person whose name is on the business.

That's the honest shape of this technology, and it's why my practice writes prescriptions instead of pitches. AI gives a business back hours. It does not give a business judgment, and anyone selling it as judgment is selling you a problem with a subscription fee.

If a seventy-year-old man can run three companies alone on well-chosen tools, a six-person firm can find five hours a week. Finding your five is a thirty-minute diagnosis, in writing, guaranteed: if the hours aren't there, you don't pay.

I've spent forty years learning what my hours are worth. Now I'd like to show you what yours are worth.