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 should never be automated. Judgment, relationships, taste, trust. 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, shaped to how your business actually works, and ship it in days, not quarters.

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.

    ↗
  • 04

    AI inside your existing tools

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

    ↗
  • 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

Three 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 & content engine · 2026

A national founder community

The problem

Members were getting real value from the community's content engine but couldn't see it. And turning each member's appearances into a steady stream of content was manual work that didn't scale past a handful of people.

What we built

Two systems that compound. First, value attribution that ties results back to each individual member. Then a self-learning social media manager for every member: it learns each person's own voice, produces content in it, and gets sharper each time the team confirms what works. As AI makes execution cheap, what stays valuable is a real person's voice and reputation, so the system amplifies that instead of flattening everyone into the same AI slop.

The result

Value that used to be invisible is now provable for every member. A content grind that didn't scale is now a system that runs in each member's own voice and keeps improving on its own.

Work 03 Marketing & revenue ops · 2026

A luxury auto dealership

The problem

Growth ran through one person: the general manager. Planning marketing and events ate his calendar, and there was no clean way to tell which of them actually drove revenue, so the work only he could do kept losing to busywork.

What we built

An AI marketing-and-operations layer that helps plan and run the dealership's events and outreach, then ties each one back to the revenue it produced. It does the legwork of a marketing manager and reports in the numbers the GM is actually measured on.

The result

Marketing and events become measurable instead of guesswork, and the GM's calendar goes back to the relationships and deals only he can handle.

(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, then 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 light for the AI era.

Stella Maris means “Star of the Sea,” the fixed light sailors have steered by for centuries, when the night closes in and the water turns against them.

AI is that kind of weather for business. The landscape shifts overnight, and the same swell that capsizes one crew can carry another forward. It's easy to be thrown off course, or simply lost, adrift in an endless sea of information and further from shore with every wave.

Hold to the light, though, and the storm becomes propulsion. We help you read the water and trim the sails, turning those same winds and waves into momentum, so you reach where you meant to go instead of wherever the current runs.

That's the role we play: something steady to steer by while AI reshapes how businesses run. No transformation decks, no new 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