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 has two roles posted: a Full-Stack Odoo Developer (custom modules, RESTful integrations, Power BI connectors, multi-company sync) and a Data Integrity Specialist whose posting says outright: "EOTECH has recently transitioned to Odoo ERP and we are refining our system configurations, permissions, and data accuracy."
Translation: fresh ERP migration, data still dirty, and he's paying a human to eyeball it. That is the most AI-shaped pain a company can have — and it's your wedge. He's proud of the CMMC/security posture, so respect the boundary before he raises it.
Dan came up running projects in giant auto plants. He thinks in process, throughput, metrics, and dashboards. 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, cleaner data, live dashboards, read-first. Don't: name-drop GPT-5 vs Claude, get abstract, or oversell. Calm and practical wins him.
Your Sharpest Angle
Don't walk in with "AI strategy." Walk in with the thing he's already spending payroll on. His open roles tell you exactly where it hurts.
They just migrated to Odoo and the data's still messy — duplicate contacts, inconsistent product/BOM records, missing fields, pricelist errors. Their current fix is a human intern eyeballing it. AI is built for exactly this: continuously read Odoo, flag the inconsistencies, and hand the team a prioritized cleanup list — plus natural-language reporting and auto-drafted exec summaries on top.
Why it's safe: read-only, scoped, audit-logged. You never let AI write into a defense ERP on day one. You surface issues for humans to approve. That framing is what makes a CMMC-certified CIO relax.
"I did nearly this exact thing for a diesel-parts company running NetSuite — same idea as Odoo, just a different ERP. I layered an operating system and live dashboards on top of it: pulled their scattered tools into one Supabase-backed brain, built warehouse and ops dashboards, and let AI reason across the data. Read-first. We replaced nothing we didn't have to. That's the pattern I'd bring here."
A short, credible nod. You're not their compliance lawyer — you're the person who obviously gets the constraint before they have to explain it.
Internal ops, Odoo back-office data, email/HR/IT helpdesk, SOPs, commercial/LE quoting. Not controlled tech data, so normal cloud AI is fine. Your first win lives here.
Anything touching design specs / manufacturing tech data needs an on-prem / air-gapped model. Doable (~$10–15k hardware + open models), but that's a phase-two conversation, not call one.
"Totally — controlled technical data stays in your environment, on-prem if it ever needs a model at all. But your Odoo back-office and commercial-side data mostly isn't controlled, and that's where the fast wins are. Cleanly separating the two is exactly the kind of thing I help with."
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.
"Dan, good to meet you. Joe's awesome — I met him this weekend and told him a little about what I do, so I appreciate the intro.
Quick background on me: I started a couple years ago helping people understand prompting and AI tools, then that turned into building websites and internal tools, then CRMs and workflow systems. Now most of my work is auditing how a business actually runs — where the data lives, how the tools connect, where the team is doing manual work, and where AI can create a real operational win.
I did a little homework and saw EOTECH recently moved onto Odoo, and that you had both a full-stack Odoo developer role and a data-integrity role. So I'm guessing a lot of the current focus is customizing Odoo, getting clean data, permissions, reporting, and integrations right. Is that about right?"
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.
Paid discovery / audit first: $1,500–$3,000 fixed. One-to-two weeks: they give you read-only access (or a data export), you profile the Odoo data, quantify the mess, and hand back a scored report + a build plan. This is the exact move you ran with WTP ($1,500 audit → retainer). It de-risks them and gets you paid to learn their world.
The build: read-only data-integrity layer that continuously flags duplicates, missing fields, BOM/product inconsistencies, pricelist errors — scoped as a $6k–$12k fixed pilot, or a retainer at $150–175/hr (your Midwest AI-consulting band). Frame the number against what he's already spending — a human intern eyeballing data is ~$40k/yr fully loaded, and it never scales.
The ask at the end — get the next meeting: "This was great. If it's useful, the natural next step is a short paid discovery — read-only, I dig into your actual Odoo data, and come back with exactly what's dirty, what it's costing you, and what I'd build. Want me to put a one-pager together and grab 30 minutes next week to walk you and whoever owns the data through it?"
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.