Available for new projects Smart humans, tactful AI · Salt Lake City

Keep the human parts human. Automate the rest.

We're a small studio that puts AI to work with tact. We find where your business is genuinely human, protect it, and automate everything around it — so your people are freed for the work only they can do. Built in days, not quarters; the system is yours.

Book a discovery call → See how it works ↓

What a Stella Maris build does for your business.

01

Grow revenue

Systems that capture and convert the opportunities slipping through the cracks today.

02

Cut costs

Automation that absorbs the manual, repetitive work eating your team's hours.

03

Free your team

Your people focus on the bigger picture — not the small tasks a system should own.

✦ Our belief

The parts of your business that make it yours — judgment, relationships, taste, trust — should never be automated. Almost everything around them should. Knowing the difference is the whole job.

(01)How it works

From one conversation to a system that runs itself.

No bloated software project. No new in-house tech team. A focused method that turns a single discovery call into working software.

01Day 0

Discovery call

A focused conversation to map your business — where the value is human and must stay that way, and where AI can quietly take the load off.

02Days 1–14

We build

We design and build a custom, AI-integrated system around that bottleneck and ship it in days, not quarters — shaped to how your business actually works.

03Ongoing

You compound

The system is yours to keep, working every day. As it pays off, we find the next lever — and build that too.

(02)Capabilities

Custom systems, built around your actual bottleneck.

We don't automate everything — only what should be. These are the kinds of systems we build most.

  • 00

    Hiring & recruiting automation

    Capture, screen, onboard and pay out referrals without the manual chase — so growth isn't capped by one person's calendar.

    ↗
  • 01

    Value & ROI dashboards

    Turn scattered performance data into a clear, undeniable view of the value you're creating for customers or members.

    ↗
  • 02

    Lead & customer pipelines

    Never let an inquiry slip. Capture, qualify, route and follow up automatically, with AI handling the first touch.

    ↗
  • 03

    Busywork automation

    Hand the repetitive, copy-paste tasks to AI that does them reliably — and frees real hours every week.

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  • 04

    AI inside your existing tools

    Bring AI into the spreadsheets, inboxes and software your team already lives in — no rip-and-replace.

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  • 05

    Owner dashboards & reporting

    See the few numbers that actually matter, gathered and updated for you instead of chased down by hand.

    ↗
(03)Selected work

Two recent builds. Each began with a single conversation.

Work — 01 Hiring & operations · 2026

A Salt Lake City roofing company

The problem

Recruiting ran on the owner's shoulders — applications scattered across inboxes, manual screening, onboarding and training done by hand. Growth was capped by how much hiring one person could personally manage.

What we built

An AI-powered recruiting and operations system: automated applicant capture, AI screening and résumé handling, a self-running training-and-onboarding flow, and a referral program that tracks and pays out signed hires.

The result

Hiring now runs as a system instead of a daily fire drill — the pipeline fills and onboards itself while the team focuses on growth.

Work — 02 Value visibility · 2026

A national founder community

The problem

Members were getting real value from the community's content engine — but couldn't see it. The impact was spread across thousands of data points with no way to tie results back to each member.

What we built

A value-attribution system that pulls the community's performance data into one place and turns it into a clear, per-member view of the tangible value created on their behalf.

The result

Value that used to be invisible is now something every member can see — strengthening retention and making the community's worth provable.

(04)Engagements

Start with a conversation. Scale as it pays off.

  • 01

    Discovery call

    A 20-minute conversation to map your highest-leverage opportunity. You leave with clarity — whether or not we build anything together.

    Free
  • 02

    Build Sprint Core

    Our core engagement. One high-leverage system, designed and built in a fixed window — and handed to you, working.

    Scoped per project
  • 03

    Operations Partner

    A standing AI operations partner. We keep building, maintaining and finding the next lever as your business grows.

    Ongoing / monthly

Pricing is scoped to each project — we'll walk you through it on the call.

(05)Why Stella Maris

A guiding star for the AI era.

Stella Maris means “Star of the Sea” — the fixed point sailors have always used to navigate. That's the role we play for the founders we work with: something steady to steer by while AI reshapes how businesses run.

We don't sell transformation decks or another subscription. We sit down, find the one thing worth fixing, and build it.

  • 01

    Tact

    We automate around what makes your business human — never through it. Knowing where that line sits is the real work.

  • 02

    Speed

    Days, not quarters. One conversation to a working system.

  • 03

    Custom-built

    Real software shaped to your business — not a template you bend to fit.

  • 04

    Owner-level outcomes

    We measure success the way you do: revenue, cost, and time back.

(06)Studio

An operations studio for founder-led businesses.

Stella Maris is a small studio based in Salt Lake City, founded by Robert Hutchins. In an era where you can automate almost anything, we care about the harder question — what you shouldn't. We work directly with owners to find where a business is genuinely human, protect it, and put AI to work everywhere around it.

No account managers. No slop. No hollowing out the thing your customers actually value. We believe AI should make a business feel more human, not less — by giving people back the time to do the work only people can do.

— Robert Hutchins, Founder

✦ Book a discovery call

Let's find your highest-leverage system.

A free 20-minute conversation. We'll map the one thing worth building first — and you'll leave with a clear next step either way.

Email us to book → (801) 875-2035