Intro Call Prep Brief · Confidential
Everything you need to walk into Wednesday's call sounding like you already understand their world — and to leave with one clean first win.
The 60-Second Version
A warm intro from a family friend to a pragmatic CIO. Not a pitch. Your job is to listen, show you respect the constraints, and find one small, measurable problem worth solving.
EOTECH is a mid-size manufacturer, not a giant. You're not out of your league.
Aim to leave with a single, low-risk first project — then expand from there.
Dan's an ops CIO. Good questions beat a slick pitch every time on call one.
The Company
Plymouth, Michigan. They design and build holographic weapon sights, magnifiers, and thermal/night-vision optics for military, law enforcement, and civilian markets.
Why "independent since 2020" matters: a company that recently left a big parent is usually still building out its own IT and processes. That's fertile ground for someone who can make a small, smart improvement.
The Person You're Meeting
Read him right and the call gets easy. He is a manufacturing-IT operations leader, not a software hobbyist. He buys outcomes, time saved, and clean metrics.
Dan came up running projects in giant auto plants. He thinks in process, throughput, metrics, and dashboards. He is not looking for a peer to geek out with about AI models. He wants someone who can take a boring, expensive task off his team's plate and prove it with a number.
Do: talk about time saved, fewer dropped requests, faster turnaround, live dashboards. Don't: name-drop GPT-5 vs Claude, get abstract, or oversell. Calm and practical wins him.
The Strategic Lens
This is the single insight that will set you apart from every other person who ever tries to sell them AI. Understand it cold.
ITAR requires that controlled technical data never travel through infrastructure a foreign national could access. Pasting ITAR-controlled designs or specs into commercial ChatGPT/Claude can legally count as an unauthorized export — a serious violation. Most AI vendors have no idea.
Internal email, HR, IT helpdesk, general SOPs, commercial/LE-side quoting, marketing. None of this is controlled tech data, so normal cloud AI is fine, fast, and cheap. This is where your first win almost certainly lives.
Anything touching design specs or manufacturing tech data needs an air-gapped / on-prem model. Now achievable for mid-size shops: ~$10–15k of hardware + open-source models that rival commercial APIs for most business tasks.
"Right — for controlled technical data you'd want a private, on-prem model so nothing ever leaves your environment. For your back-office and commercial-side work, cloud is perfectly fine. The trick is separating those two cleanly, and that's exactly the kind of thing I help figure out."
Where AI Creates Value
Don't pitch these as a plan. Surface the right one based on what Dan tells you hurts. Each is ITAR-safe (Lane 1) unless noted, and each maps to something you've already built.
Why You're Credible
You don't need defense experience. You need to show you build small autonomous agents that watch an input, pull from documents, and draft the next action — without touching anything sensitive.
"I help businesses find where AI actually saves time, then either advise your team or build it — a second brain over your own documents, agents that handle repetitive work, or just practical tips you can run with. Everything stays in non-sensitive internal operations, which matters in an ITAR shop like yours."
You've delivered value both ways — as quick advisory tips (Brandon Noll, Jim Lancaster, Matt Shatto) and as full builds (WTP, Gulker). Lead with flexibility: "I can advise or build, whatever's right." That lowers the commitment and fits a first call.
The Call Playbook
Ask these, listen hard, and let the right use case surface on its own. The goal is to find the one task worth taking off their plate.
Flow & Next Steps
Warm open (2 min). Thank Joe, keep it human. "Mostly wanted to meet you — let's make it useful."
Discovery (15–20 min). Work through the questions. Listen 70% of the time. Take notes on the pain points.
Reflect back (3 min). "Here's the cleanest first win I'm hearing..." Name one specific, small thing.
Offer the next step. "Want me to put together a one-page, fixed-scope pilot on just that? Small, low-risk, measurable." Then send it within a day.
You're not biting off EOTECH. You're finding one small, measurable win and pricing it so it's easy to say yes. Land it, prove the ROI, expand into a retainer. That's the whole game on call one.
Sources: EOTech (Wikipedia) · Dan Agosta (LinkedIn, ZoomInfo) · StartProto, Microsoft & AODocs on manufacturing AI ROI · Greypike, Concentric & OutcomeOps on ITAR / air-gapped AI. Prepared by Carlile Advisors, June 29 2026.