You've bought the AI. Your team still isn't using it.
Founder Engine runs a Growth Skunkworks inside your business: a nimble team spun off to the side, running fast AI growth experiments alongside your day-to-day, not bolted on top of it. We find the levers that move your numbers, prove them inside 90 days, and train your team to keep pulling them after we've gone.
If the honest answer is not much has changed, the problem is not your team, the tech, or the AI you chose. It is your company's immune system.
So we do not fight it head on. We build a Skunkworks inside your own company: your people, on the latest tools, the grunt work stripped out, their time freed up, and the wins spread across the whole company.
America needed a jet fighter, fast. Lockheed knew its own factory, its tooling and its sign-offs could never move at that pace. So Kelly Johnson took a small team, set them up in a rented tent on the side of the lot, and freed them from the usual process. They built the XP-80 in 143 days. They called it the Skunk Works.
Your business has the same problem with AI. Your systems, process and people, the immune system, can't move at the pace AI demands. So we do what Lockheed did: a nimble growth team spun out from inside your own organisation, off to the side, free to embrace AI fully, with expert advisors at their shoulder. Business as usual carries on. The experiments run alongside it, a few plug lightly into tools you already use, and only the proven winners get folded back in.
We build reusable AI skills for the jobs your team does every week, so work that used to eat hours runs in minutes, in your voice and to your standard.
We take the repetitive, manual work off your team's plate and automate it, so their time goes on the work that actually grows the business.
Fast, focused experiments on your real growth levers, run alongside business as usual. We kill what fails, tune what's promising, and go all in on what works.
Every experiment has an owner, a target and a deadline. We agree the leading metric that matters and move it inside the 90 days, in the open, where you can see it.
A method that maps where the work really goes, builds the systems to carry it, and gets your leadership pointed the same way.
Book a call ↗01 MAP
We map every person's real work to find exactly what AI can take off their plate, and score where the team starts, so the change is measured, not guessed.
02 BUILD
Your team builds real automations with us, not slideware. On the first engagement that removed roughly 80% of the automatable work from a single role, and left 17 installable skills behind.
03 ALIGN
Every leader writes what a tenfold company looks like and what has to change to get there. We map where they agree, where they do not, and what to do about it, so the whole business points one way.
They arrive, spend two weeks learning 10% of your business, make sweeping recommendations, then leave. Three months later you find they broke a dependency between sales and operations that nobody told them about.
We don't parachute in and leave. The Founder Engine team embeds with yours and builds it together, so the knowledge stays in the building.
You hand a virtual assistant access to AI. They generate content that sounds like everyone else's. Your brand voice disappears, and your audience can smell the slop a mile off.
We train your people to use AI in your voice, on your real work, not generic output nobody asked for.
You're CEO, CMO, CTO, COO and CFO. Every decision bottlenecks through one person. When you're ill or away, the business stalls and nobody else has the full picture.
We build engines your team runs without you, so the business stops depending on a single head holding all the context.
We don't sell you software, and we don't send a consultant who vanishes. The Founder Engine team works alongside yours for 90 days, and the capability stays when we go.
Agencies are full of good people. But you rent their expertise by the month, and your team never learns it. We give your team the tools and the training, so the capability stays in your building after we've gone.
Renting it
Take on two or three of these and you are past £10,000 a month. Every month. Stop paying and it all stops, and your team owns none of it.
Owning it
Buy the tools once. Train the team once. Delete the retainers for good.
Figures are typical UK mid-market agency retainers (service fees, before media and ad spend). Sources: UK agency pricing guides, 2025/26.
I'm Ruari Fairbairns. Thirty years and seven businesses, from a broking floor in the City to One Year No Beer, which grew past 100,000 members in 138 countries. For the last few years I have been building AI systems by hand, inside real companies, to find out what they can actually do.
Here is what I found. The tools are extraordinary and almost nobody uses them properly. You buy the subscriptions, the team pokes at them for a week, and the value sits there untouched while you keep paying agencies thousands a month for work your own people could own.
Founder Engine is what I would have wanted. A small expert team that comes in, builds AI into your business with your people, moves a real number in ninety days, and leaves the capability behind. No jargon, no dependency, no retainer you cannot leave.
RUARI FAIRBAIRNS, FOUNDER
One flat price for the full 90-day Growth Skunkworks. No setup fees, no surprises, no rolling retainer you can't get out of.
If you are paying agencies, you are likely spending more than this every month, with no end date. This is £7,500 a month for ninety days. Then your team carries it for nothing.
We agree the one number that matters before we start. If we have not moved it by day ninety, we keep working for free until we do. You carry no risk.
Book a call ↗We take ten businesses per cohort, so we stay hands-on with every one.
What happens after you book
A short call to see if we are a fit. No pitch.
We map your growth levers together and agree the metrics to move.
You join the next cohort and we get to work.
The maths is simple
+AI
+your growth team
=your unfair advantage