RC Rick Conner
Rime Hill LLC — fractional CTO & AI systems
Fractional CTO · AI Systems Consulting

Your systems are
the business.
I make sure they hold.

I help small and mid-size companies modernize their systems and put AI to work — without hiring a full-time CTO. Twenty-five years building and running the systems businesses depend on: enterprise architecture, a $40M+ loan platform I built and ran as a one-man IT department, a retail chain I founded and sold, and CrewHub360, the SaaS platform I’m building now.

rick@rickconner.com See engagements
Track record
25+
Years shipping production systems
$40M+
Loan portfolio the system carried
1
Person ran the entire stack
2
Businesses built and exited
Rime Hill LLC · Fractional CTO & AI systems consulting
Systems & architecture
Legacy rescue, modernization, build-vs-buy
AI in production
Automation that removes real manual work
Technology leadership
Roadmap, vendors, and your dev team
Engagements

Four ways to work together.

The prices are on this page on purpose. You should know whether I am in your range before you spend a call finding out.

Fractional CTO
$5,000 – $10,000per month · retainer

Ongoing technology leadership, one to two days a week. I own your systems roadmap, vendor decisions, build-vs-buy calls, and technical oversight of your team or contractors. Senior leadership without a $250k salary.

Ongoing · 1–2 days per week
AI & automation assessment
$3,000 – $7,500fixed fee

A two-to-three-week deep dive into where your business is leaking time and money on manual work. You get a written roadmap: what to automate, what it costs, what it saves, in priority order. Implementation billed separately or folded into a retainer.

Fixed fee · 2–3 weeks
Systems rescue & modernization
Fixed pricescoped after assessment

Legacy system falling over, a vendor holding you hostage, or a build that went sideways. I audit what’s there, stabilize it, and lay out the path forward. No open-ended billing.

Scoped project · no hourly drift
Advisory
$250per hour

Founder-to-founder calls for companies that want a second opinion before committing to a big technical decision.

By the hour · no retainer
The difference

Why me and not the next consultant.

Real systems, real money

I have shipped systems that processed actual money, with actual consequences when they broke — not decks and demos.

AI in production, daily

I run AI in production every day, so I know what actually works versus what the vendors promise it will.

A founder, not an advisor

I am a working founder, not a career consultant. I think in P&L, not frameworks.

No licences to sell you

I prefer free and self-hosted tooling where it makes sense, so I am never quietly reselling you someone else’s licences.

Proof, not a portfolio piece

I ship the kind of system
I would tell you to build.

CrewHub360 is my own SaaS platform for field service contractors: multi-tenant Laravel, an offline-first React Native app, Stripe Connect, QuickBooks sync and Claude-powered features running in production. When I tell you what AI is actually worth inside a real business, this is where I learned it.

  • Quoting & pricebook
  • Scheduling & dispatch
  • Offline-first mobile app
  • Invoicing & reporting
  • Same-day Stripe payouts
  • Client portal
app.crewhub360.com/dispatch
Today’s dispatch8 TECHS · 14 JOBS
AC not cooling — Reyes
9:00a · Marcus T. · HVAC
En route
Water heater swap — Doyle
10:30a · Priya S. · Plumbing
Scheduled
Panel upgrade — Whitfield
1:00p · Dré B. · Electrical
Quote sent
Drain clear — Okafor
Paid · $280 · same-day payout
Paid
Who you would be hiring

From the firehouse to the codebase.

Rick Conner
15 yrs
Firefighter / Captain
1
Person ran the whole stack
2
Businesses built & exited

For nearly two decades I was the only IT professional at a multi-state consumer finance company. I architected its Loan Management System from scratch and owned every layer — database design, front end, ACH payment processing, infrastructure and security. When a payment file was wrong at 2am, there was no team to escalate to. That is a different kind of accountability than reviewing someone else’s architecture diagram.

Before the code, fifteen years as a firefighter and captain and eight as an EMT. That is where I learned to triage under pressure, decide on incomplete information, and tell people the truth about what is actually wrong — which turns out to be most of this job. Along the way I founded and scaled City Vape to three locations and about 22 employees, then negotiated its sale, so I have signed the front of a payroll cheque and not just the back.

The throughline is the same everywhere: systems that hold under pressure. That is what you would be hiring.

Full résumé LinkedIn
Selected work

Production systems, built end to end.

Real software running real operations — not demos. Here’s a recent sample; more lives on the work page.

All app samples
Live & operational
Corporate Intranet
Corporate HR & Operations Platform

A production-ready corporate intranet built on Laravel 11 + Bootstrap 5 + MySQL, containerized with Docker Compose. Covers the full HR lifecycle out of the box: employee onboarding, directory, PTO, documents, and operations dashboards.

Laravel 11Bootstrap 5MySQLDocker
View details
intranet.local/dashboard
Operations overviewHR
Onboarding — 3 pending
New hires this week
Action
PTO requests
5 awaiting approval
Review
Directory
128 active employees
Synced
I also ship native iOS apps, solo. Two on the App Store and two more in the pipeline, all Swift — design, build, review and release, start to finish. Not what you would hire me for, but it is where I keep proving I can take something all the way out the door. See the apps.
Track record

Twenty-five years, the short version.

Full résumé
IT Director · Insight Management
2006 – May 2025

Sole IT professional for a multi-state consumer finance operation. Designed and built a proprietary Loan Management System from the ground up (PHP, Python, MySQL, IIS) that ran a $40M+ portfolio across the full customer lifecycle, plus an ACH pipeline compliant with NACHA rules and a customer-facing portal.

Owner & Operator · City Vape
Mar 2015 – Jun 2023

Founded and scaled a retail chain to three locations and ~22 employees in the coastal Georgia market. Ran every function — hiring, inventory, vendors, finance, compliance — then negotiated and executed the sale of the business.

Web Developer · WeDoSites.com
1999 – 2006

Built custom content management systems and e-commerce shopping carts deployed across hundreds of client websites, integrating credit-card merchant accounts and payment gateways across a high-volume Perl/PHP/JavaScript environment.

How we start

One call.

You tell me where it hurts. I tell you honestly whether I can help and what it would take. If it’s not a fit, I’ll say so on the call — I would rather lose the engagement than take one where I cannot move the needle.

Where does it hurt?

A legacy system going sideways, a vendor you cannot get out from under, or too many hours going into work a machine should be doing. Tell me which one and we will start there.

rick@rickconner.com Connect on LinkedIn