I build automation for small businesses that need it to actually work.

I am Tom Faries. I run Headwaters Automation out of Portland, Oregon. I help small and mid-sized businesses replace the slow, manual parts of their operations with AI and automation systems that run reliably, so the team you hired can spend their time on the work you hired them for.

Before this practice I spent more than sixteen years across LinkedIn/Microsoft and growth-stage startups like Metadata and Pantheon, leading and selling into brand marketing, performance marketing, marketing operations, revenue operations, and sales. At Pantheon I worked closely with developers and the IT infrastructure leaders who keep modern web platforms running. Across all of it I saw the same pattern, both inside the companies I worked for and across the businesses I sold into: smart people stuck running workflows that should have been running themselves, painful manual processes everywhere from HR to legal to sales to marketing, and tools that promised to fix it but never quite did. That is who I built Headwaters for. Businesses that deserve operations that hold up, without paying for a six-figure consultant or a full-time ops hire.

The name comes from the headwaters of a river, the point where everything downstream starts. That is where I like to work in a business. The upstream systems (the ones that produce leads, serve customers, and generate reports) set the quality of everything that flows from them. Get those right and the rest of the organization runs cleaner.

My client roster is intentionally small. Small enough that the work I take on always gets my full attention. I take fixed-scope projects with written success criteria. If I cannot tell you at the start what a system will do and how you will know it is working, I will not build it. When the scope or specialty calls for it, I have additional senior resources I know and trust. The relationship, the judgment, and the accountability stay with me.

How I think about AI

Most AI consulting right now is selling possibility. I am more interested in what ships and what it actually returns. That means I prefer the unglamorous pattern that recovers ten hours a week, every week, over the impressive demo that no one runs after launch. It also means I will tell you when a workflow is better handled without AI at all, because the goal is time back, lower costs, and fewer dropped balls, not a story about how much AI you used.

AI is one tool in the automation stack, not the whole stack. A good automation consultant should know when to reach for it and when to reach for something simpler.

What I care about

Systems that keep running on their own, day after day. Access and logins managed so nothing quietly breaks a year from now. A clear record of what the system did and when, ready when you need to look back. Safety checks anywhere it touches a customer. Documentation written in plain language that still makes sense six months later, to a real person, not an engineer.

If that sounds like what you want, start here.