Pittsburgh · Since 2010 · Senior people, no junior labor
Slow website. Customers waiting on hold. Bookkeeper still copying numbers between two systems every Friday. We fix what's actually slowing your business down. Sometimes that's a smarter tool, sometimes a better website, sometimes (less often than you'd think) AI. Senior people only. No junior labor.
Or call +1 (412) 998-1370 for a six-minute phone version.
Your answers stay between you and Marc. Used to write your report. Not stored after delivery, not shared, not used to train anything.
5 minutes · browser only · instant snapshot
Eight quick questions about your business. Where the team's time is going, what's been on your list, what's broken. Submit, and a written look at three things you could fix this quarter loads on screen. The full report lands in your inbox shortly after, with rough effort on each fix.
6 minutes · call now · report in 10 minutes
Call +1 (412) 998-1370 any time. We listen, take notes, and write up the same report after we hang up. No survey, no script. Email lands in ten minutes with three things you could fix and what each would take.
30 minutes · video or phone · same week
Book directly on Marc's calendar. We talk about your business, what's actually eating the team's day, and what we'd do about it. Marc writes the report from your conversation and sends it the next morning. No pitch, no junior staff, no follow-up unless you ask.
All three are free. When you're ready to engage, the paid menu ↓ picks up where the intake left off.
The Pittsburgh businesses that are growing right now are not the ones running splashy projects. They are the ones whose websites finally show up on Google. Whose phones do not ring all day with the same five questions. Whose teams stopped copying numbers between two systems on Friday afternoons.
You don't need a strategy. You don't need a six-month engagement. You need to start with one or two things that are actually broken, fix them in days, and move on to the next. That's what we do.
Law firms with 10 to 150 attorneys. Associates buried in document review. Partners want the firm to stop being the slow one. Client material can't go anywhere off the firm's servers. Pittsburgh law firm offering →
Healthcare practices and specialty groups. Charts, prior-auth, intake — all eating staff hours. Patient information has to stay where it should. HIPAA-aware AI for healthcare →
Accounting, CPA, and financial firms. Tax-season document work pulling everyone under, client confidentiality blocking the off-the-shelf tools the national firms use. AI for financial services →
Manufacturers, contractors, and insurance agencies. Decades of records nobody can search, retiring senior people taking the last copy of how things work with them. AI for manufacturing →
20 to 250 employees, $5M to $75M revenue. The owner, managing partner, or COO signs the check. No procurement committee.
Ready to start in 14 days, not six months. Working tools beat slide decks. Retainers from $4,500 a month, with the first month free.
Your site has not been touched since 2018, you've stopped getting calls from search, and the form does not work on a phone. We rebuild it in two to four weeks and set up the search side so it actually shows up. Then we leave you with something you can update yourself.
Calls ringing all day with the same five questions. After-hours messages piling up. We set up a system that answers the easy ones, escalates the real ones, and emails your team a clean log every morning. Your customers stop waiting; your team stops repeating themselves.
Your team is copying numbers between two systems every Friday. Or chasing approvals through email threads. Or printing things to scan and re-enter. We connect the systems so the work just stops happening. The first one usually pays for itself in a month.
Smart search through years of files. Customer questions answered overnight. First-draft contracts your team edits instead of writes from scratch. We use AI when it solves a real problem, not when it makes a good headline. Your data stays put on your servers — nothing leaves the building unless you say it can.
Local AI deployment → · Document intelligence → · RAG pipelines →
Most AI shops sell you an integration. Wire a chatbot to your support queue, pipe ChatGPT into your inbox, demo it on a tuesday, call it done. The demo runs. The production system breaks the first time a customer asks a question the model hadn't seen. You're left wondering whose number to call.
That's not what we ship. Every system we put in your business sits inside a harness — the same kind of harness senior software teams have always built around anything that's expensive when it fails. It's what twenty-nine years of building software for hospitals, contractors, education companies and Fortune 500 clients quietly turned into. AI just made the harness necessary even for small jobs.
Which decisions belong to the model. Which stay with a human. Where the handoffs are. What "done" actually means. Every step gets an owner, an input, an output. This is not a prompt — it's a defined process. Most AI projects skip this and ship a model bolted to a tool. They break the same way every time.
Prevents: shipping a model without a workflow behind it.
Ninety-seven scripts run before and after every operation the AI takes. They catch hallucinated facts, blocked file paths, injected prompts, off-policy commands, and silent failures the model would otherwise hide under polished-sounding language.
Prevents: AI confidently saying "done" when it isn't.
Every output is run end-to-end against the real path. Unit tests pass is not the same as the system works. "Should work" is never a load-bearing claim. Every report names one thing that was not verified so you know exactly what's been checked and what hasn't.
Prevents: demo theater.
Structured, persistent, queryable. Not a chat history. What worked, what didn't, who your clients are, what your team named the thing, the constraints you mentioned in passing six months ago. Survives across sessions, across people, across models.
Prevents: repeating the same explanation every week.
If something goes wrong on a Tuesday at 2:47 PM, we can show you the exact input, the exact output, what the system was asked to consider, and what it chose to do. Required for healthcare. Required for finance. Required by us regardless.
Prevents: "we have no idea why it did that."
Every change committed to version control. Every deployment checkpointed. Every autonomous decision reversible. Kill switches — file integrity monitors, HALT files, three autonomy tiers from "propose only" to "act freely within bounds." You're never one bad day away from a rebuild.
Prevents: a confident change you can't get back.
Twenty-six specialized roles — code reviewer, security checker, debugger, testing, architecture, performance — each with a narrow remit. The proposer doesn't approve its own work. The reviewer doesn't know the proposer's reasoning. Disagreement surfaces. Single-model overconfidence doesn't.
Prevents: one model talking itself into a bad call.
Who keeps the system tuned. What docs you have. What metrics get watched. How a recovery looks the first time something genuinely goes sideways. We don't ship a system and ghost — but the system also can't depend on us being there. It has to belong to your people the day after launch.
Prevents: a "production" system that decays into nobody's-job.
The AI projects you've heard about that "didn't go anywhere" almost always failed in the same place — not on the model, on what wasn't built around the model. That's where your money actually goes. The harness is the difference between a chatbot you can't trust and a system you can.
Every recommendation is matched to your business, your team, and your timeline. Some businesses get a website rebuild. Some get a customer-service tool that handles after-hours calls. Some get automation for one specific process eating the team's day. Some get smarter tools under the hood. The report tells you what fits — and what doesn't.
Every fix has an estimated time saved or money saved. Every recommendation includes a one-paragraph implementation sketch you can hand to anyone, us or someone else. If we're not the right fit, the report says so.
After you read it, you decide if there's a next step. No follow-up sequence. No drip campaign. No pitch unless you ask for one.
Marc Shade has been shipping software for businesses since 1997 — Fortune 500 clients, Pittsburgh contractors, education companies, and software startups. Scott Frederick Laughlin builds infrastructure and AI systems. The people you talk to are the people writing the code. No junior labor. No offshoring. No handoff chain.
We work across the spectrum: full system builds where the work demands it, simpler tool setups and training where it doesn't, and the unglamorous middle layer that keeps the business running. Based in Pittsburgh, serving small and mid-sized businesses regionally and nationally.
Pittsburgh service area: tech help · website design & SEO · business automation · AI consulting
Industry-specific work: law firms · healthcare · finance & CPA · legal services · manufacturing
Reference guides: local LLM hardware · RAG vs fine-tuning · Ollama vs vLLM
2 Acre Studios is a Pittsburgh tech shop, founded 2010. We fix what's actually slowing your business down — websites that should show up on Google but don't, customer-service systems that ring all day with the same five questions, automation for busywork your team is doing by hand, and AI when it earns its place. Senior people only, no junior labor.
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. We serve small and mid-sized businesses across Pittsburgh, Allegheny County, Western Pennsylvania, and clients across North America. For Pittsburgh-area clients we come on-site for hardware installation, stakeholder discovery, and go-live without additional travel billing.
Pittsburgh small and mid-sized businesses — 20 to 250 employees, $5M to $75M revenue — where the owner, managing partner, or COO signs the check and there is no procurement committee. Particularly strong fit: law firms (10–150 attorneys), healthcare practices, accounting and CPA firms, and manufacturers, contractors and insurance agencies. Ready to start in 14 days, not six months.
Three ways in are free: the 5-minute self-assessment, a 6-minute phone assessment at (412) 998-1370, and a 30-minute call with founder Marc Shade. One paid diagnostic sits between free and full engagement: The AI Assessment ($1,995 fixed, 12-page punch list, 5-hrs-per-week-back guarantee). Then the four engagement tiers: Foundation Retainer ($4,500/mo, 20 hours, first month free), Two-Week Deep Discovery ($7,500 fixed), Proof of Concept ($25K–$60K over 4–6 weeks), Production Build (from $75K, 8–16 weeks). Senior people only — Marc Shade and Scott Frederick Laughlin write the code.
Both, but most weeks the work is more boring than AI. We fix websites that don't show up on Google, set up customer-service systems that handle the same five questions automatically, and automate the busywork your team is copying between two systems every Friday. AI gets used when it earns its place — smart search across years of files, first-draft contracts, after-hours customer questions — not when it makes a good headline.
The harness. Most AI shops sell you an integration — wire ChatGPT to your inbox, hook a chatbot to your support queue, demo runs, production breaks. We build the eight-part system around the AI: workflow design, guard rails, verification gates, structured memory, decision log, rollback, specialized sub-agent review, and ongoing ownership. Even OpenAI's own Frontier Alliances post now argues the enterprise AI bottleneck isn't the model — it's how agents are built and operated inside the company. The AI projects that "didn't go anywhere" almost always failed on what wasn't built around the model, not on the model itself. Read the full argument →
Yes. For law firms, healthcare practices, CPA firms and any other organization where client material can't leave the building, we deploy systems on your own infrastructure — Ollama-based local LLMs, on-premise document intelligence, customer-support AI that never touches a third-party cloud. Your data stays put.
Foundation retainer engagements start immediately and the first month is free. The free 5-minute self-assessment delivers a written report the same day. The Two-Week Deep Discovery ships a working prototype in 14 days. Standard local AI deployment is production-ready in 2–4 weeks. Website rebuilds run 2–4 weeks.
Call (412) 998-1370 for the six-minute phone assessment, call (412) 407-6170 to reach Marc directly, email marc@2acrestudios.com, take the 5-minute self-assessment, or book 30 minutes on Marc's calendar. All four are free.
If you've read this far
You're either still reading because something here matched what you're working on, or because you wanted to make sure I wasn't wasting your time. Either is fair.
The path with the least friction is the assessment line: (412) 998-1370. Six minutes on the phone, written report by email in ten minutes. Same questions as the web version, just over the phone. The full report lands in your inbox shortly. If you want to pick a time on my calendar instead, that link is below. If you'd rather call me directly, that number is too.
And if the answer turns out to be "you're mostly fine, you don't need us right now," we'll tell you that too.
Or take the 5-minute self-assessment. Or book 30 minutes on the calendar. Or call me directly: (412) 407-6170. Or jump straight to the paid menu.