Who I Help in Durham and the Triangle
I work with small businesses in Durham, Raleigh, Chapel Hill and the rest of the Triangle. Mostly contractors, coaches and local service businesses. The owner does the craft all day and the paperwork after dinner.
Porch Light Studio is me, Sarah Chamberlain. I’m a creative director. I spent a decade building a creative org from a handful of freelancers to forty people, across the US and India. Most of that job was taking chores off talented people so they could do the part they’re great at.
It started as the neighborhood creative studio. Then the contractors and coaches I was building for kept asking for the same thing, and it wasn’t design. It was time.
What I Do
There are three ways in. Most people arrive through one and stay for another.
| Way in | What it is | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Ready-made tools | Tools I piloted with real owners: a free Tone of Voice tool, a voice assistant, a review engine, the Community Post for social, and content repurposing. Each one is installed in two sessions. | Tone of Voice is free. Two ready-made tools come with Teardown + Tools, from $8,000. |
| The Teardown | One month. I follow one real job start to finish, find the chore that hurts most, and build a custom tool for it. | From $5,000 |
| The Studio | An AI design studio with eleven designer personas. Five minutes of brief gets you a design packet: palette, typefaces, logo directions and image prompts. | Membership; details on the Studio page |
The ready-made AI tools are the fastest door. They run on software you already pay for. Each one came out of a pilot with a real small business.
The Teardown is for owners whose list doesn’t match the shelf. It’s hands on, and it ends with something you can open and use the next morning.
The Studio is for brand work: logos, posters and ad creative from a designer whose eye fits your business.
Everything I build runs in your voice and waits for your thumb before anything goes out. You stay the director. The AI takes the chores.
How Working Together Goes
A Teardown takes one month, and each week has a job.
- Week one: I learn how you work and who your customers are. Then we walk one real job start to finish and watch where it slows down.
- Week two: every chore gets sorted by tier. Then each one is scored on how often it happens, how much it hurts and how easy it is to set up.
- Week three: you get a working version in your hands and try it on a real job while I watch.
- Week four: it gets folded into how you already work, handed to the right person and checked for hours saved.
You don’t need to be technical. If you can send a voice memo, you can run what we build.
Your website platform is fine, too. Ash & Pine and Game Face are both on Wix, and I work inside what you have.
At the end you get a working tool and a short written playbook for it. You also get a private client workspace on this site. Your research, your plan and your tools live there, behind a sign-in that’s just for you.
What Does It Cost?
I price by package, and the first conversation is free.
- Teardown, from $5,000. One month and one custom tool, built, installed and measured, with up to about eight hours of build time.
- Teardown + Tools, from $8,000. The Teardown plus two ready-made tools, each installed in two 90-minute sessions.
- Ongoing, $800 a month. Three-month minimum. I keep the tools tuned as the business changes, add one a quarter, and the social manager keeps posting.
Bigger builds or more custom tools get quoted after week two, once we know what’s worth building.
After the build, most small businesses I work with land between $100 and $250 a month in tools. The full breakdown is in what AI consulting costs a small business, next to what other consultants charge.
Who’s Already Using This?
Two pilots, both owners I know and trust, both built before any of this had a price. The full write-ups are on the case studies page.
Ash & Pine Construction
Ash & Pine is a woman-owned general contractor in Raleigh-Durham. Ashley was pricing every job by hand at 9pm, item by item from a supplier catalog. Happy clients weren’t leaving reviews because nobody was asking them.
We built a new brand and a nine-page Wix site. It shows real price ranges, which no other contractor in her area does. A review request now goes out the day she hands over a finished job, written in her words. She’s at 4.8 on Google.
Her JobTread is connected to Claude, so she can ask out loud what’s on today’s list and get an answer. A separate business number and a voice assistant she can talk to from the truck are next.
Game Face Performance
Grant runs Game Face Performance, a mental-performance coaching business. He was booking a full roster of athletes by text and doing time-zone math late at night. His weekends went to keeping up.
His online booking is live now. Clients pick a time inside the hours he set, and the confirmations go out on their own. A separate business number is rolling out, so parent check-ins have a home that isn’t his personal cell.
Here’s what Grant said about working together:
“Sarah has an incredible talent for truly understanding my business and identifying what it needs to operate more effectively. She breaks down complex processes into clear, manageable steps that make sense and are easy to implement. Equally impressive is how quickly she turns ideas into action, moving from strategy to execution with remarkable speed and precision.”
Grant, Game Face Performance
What to Expect on the First Call
No pitch deck and no jargon. We take a real look at where your hours go and what we could hand off first.
Tell me about the job that eats your week. If the tools alone would get you there, I’ll say so. If your website platform is what’s holding you back, I’ll say that too.
I’ll also tell you what AI can’t do for you. Apple keeps iMessage, Notes and Reminders closed to outside tools. So business texts go through a work line, and your personal phone stays personal.
I read every note myself and reply within a couple of days.
Where to Start
The light’s on whenever you’re ready. Tell me what’s eating your time, and we’ll start there.