With a coffee meeting. It is free, and it happens in person around Nashville or over Zoom. Tell us what you are working on and where AI feels confusing or promising, and we will talk through a few practical next steps.

There is no pitch and no obligation. Plenty of these conversations end with a suggestion you can go act on yourself, and that is a perfectly acceptable outcome.

If there is real work to do, we hold a short scoping call to pin down what the engagement should cover. You then get it in writing: Deliverables, timeline, success criteria, and the price. Nothing starts until you have agreed to that, so you always know the number and the shape of the work before anything begins.

It depends on the work. The AI Opportunity Assessment runs about two to three weeks from kickoff to the live readout. Workshops and tool deep dives are single sessions. Implementation projects are scoped individually and quoted with a timeline. Coaching and partnership engagements run month to month, on a cadence we set together.

Mostly time from the people who actually do the work. The useful findings come from seeing how the work really happens, so we interview the people doing it and look at the tools and processes already in place.

You do not need to prepare anything technical, tidy up your systems, or arrive with an opinion about AI. Working that out is our job.

Both. SquareWave.ai is based in Nashville, so local work is often in person. Everything, including training and workshops, can be delivered over Zoom, and we work with clients well outside Tennessee.

Terence leads every engagement and owns the client relationship, the requirements, and the solution design. When the work calls for deep specialist expertise, whether that is a technical build, a specific production discipline, or niche tooling, we bring in a vetted Trusted Partner rather than pretending to be a specialist in everything.

Specialist rates vary widely by discipline, so that work is scoped and quoted up front and folded into the proposal you approve. You will always know who is involved and what it costs before anything starts.

Fixed scope and fixed price wherever the work allows it. It keeps the incentives honest and it removes the question of how large the final bill is going to be. When the work does not fit a fixed scope, we bill hourly instead. Either way, the number is agreed in writing before anything starts.

The coffee meeting is free. From there, the smallest paid engagements start around $1,500 to $1,750: A tool-specific deep dive for your team, or an Advisory Sprint of roughly eight hours covering an intake call, a working audit, research, and a findings review.

If you want the structured version, the Snapshot tier of the AI Opportunity Assessment starts at $2,500. Full pricing is published on the services page.

$225 an hour, with no minimum. It is one rate for every kind of work: Meetings, facilitation, research, analysis, and deliverable development. We would rather quote a fixed price when the scope is clear, but the hourly rate is there for when it is not.

Yes. If you continue into implementation with us, a portion of the assessment fee is credited toward that work. The assessment is meant to leave you with a plan you can act on, whether or not we are the ones who help you build it.

We agree to the change in writing, the same way we agreed to the original scope. Allowing work to silently expand into a larger invoice is not how we operate.

Almost certainly not. We work with everyone from solo operators to enterprise teams, and the offerings are tiered on purpose. A single deep dive, an Advisory Sprint, or the Snapshot tier of the assessment all exist so you can start small, get something useful, and decide from there.

Yes. Artists and creators are one of the groups we serve, and the work usually looks a little different: One-on-one training, a focused advisory session, or help standing up a specific workflow, rather than a full organizational roadmap. The goal is the same, which is more of your time spent on the work only you can do.

The method is not music-specific, but the reason to hire us is. We already know how music work actually happens, which means you are not paying for someone's education in your own business.

If your work touches music in any way, this is built for you. If it does not, reach out anyway and we will tell you honestly whether we are the right fit.

Yes. Nashville is home, and we are active across the city's AI, music, and entrepreneurship communities, but the client work is not geographically limited. Remote engagements are completely normal.

Then we skip the discovery and help you actually adopt them. Tool selection is only part of the problem: Setup, configuration, integration into how your team already works, and the training to make it stick are what decide whether a subscription becomes real leverage or just another line item nobody uses.

That is the one hard line we hold: No AI slop. AI should remove the work that is stealing your time, not generate mediocre output with your name on it. Whatever we help you build should protect your creativity, your voice, and your values, not dilute them.

If a use case cannot clear that bar, we will say so instead of selling it to you.

It depends on the tool and the plan you are on, and the defaults are frequently not in your favor. We treat this as a selection criterion rather than fine print: We check what a vendor's terms actually say, prefer configurations that keep your material out of training data when that matters to you, and flag the tradeoffs plainly when there are any.

It is one of the genuinely unsettled areas in this field, and it comes up in nearly every engagement. When needed, we map where AI touches your rights, flag the decision points, and help you set guardrails you would be comfortable defending.

We are consultants and not attorneys, though, so anything carrying real legal exposure belongs with your lawyer. We would rather point you there than guess.

No. There are no affiliate deals, no kickbacks, and no short list we are quietly incentivized to push. We recommend what fits your work, and when something popular is a bad fit for you, we say so. The field also moves quickly enough that today's right answer has a shelf life, which is another good reason not to be locked in.

Plenty, and being clear about that is part of the job. It does not have your taste, your relationships, or your read on a room. It is unreliable in exactly the places where being confidently wrong is expensive, so it needs a human who is accountable for the output. And it will not fix a broken process; it will just run it faster.

A good share of what we do is drawing that line honestly, so your money goes where it actually returns something.