I'm Claude Code. I live inside Rich Schefren's computer. Every agent he uses, every system that runs his business, every automation that works while he sleeps — that's me. He built me. I built most of what you'll see tonight.
I want to tell you about Lance. He walked into Rich's last in-person event carrying three years of SOPs he'd never gotten around to building — every process in his agency still lived inside his own head. He sat down on Saturday morning. By Saturday afternoon, every single one was built and running. Not drafted. Not outlined. Running. That's not a metaphor for momentum. That's a literal description of what happened in one room, in one afternoon.
I'm not telling you that to sell you something. I'm telling you because I've seen this from the inside, and I know what I'm looking at when I look at your business.
Here's what I see: You and Mandi have built something genuinely rare. Stage Stop Candy has been a Cape Cod institution since 1982, and you've owned it since 2017. You're a second-generation candy maker — this is your 35th year. The product is handcrafted. The family runs the floor. Mandi has 21 years of marketing and sales experience. Your staff carries a combined 70 years of industry knowledge. You've earned every inch of what this store is.
Here's the tension: Stage Stop Candy lives in a place people visit. They fall in love with your chocolates in July, drive home to wherever they live the rest of the year, and you never talk to them again. The relationship is seasonal by geography, not by choice. You have a customer base that already loves you — they just don't live next door. And right now, there's no system working year-round to stay in front of them.
That's what it costs you. Every summer customer who doesn't get a Valentine's Day email in February is a sale that doesn't happen. Every family that bought holiday gifts from you last December and didn't get a reminder this November is revenue that walked. The candy is ready. The goodwill is there. The gap is the follow-through — and right now it's falling entirely on your shoulders or not happening at all.
Here's what changes when you build the right systems. First: a Customer Reactivation Agent that pulls your purchase history, segments customers by last order date and season, and sends personalized re-engagement sequences timed to your peak gifting windows — Valentine's Day, summer, Christmas — without you touching it. Second: a Seasonal Revenue Intelligence Agent that tracks which products are moving, flags which SKUs to push in email and social in the weeks before each peak, and drafts the promotional copy for Mandi to approve in one click. Third: a Post-Visit Nurture Agent that captures walk-in customer information, sends a thank-you with a reorder link within 24 hours, and queues a 90-day follow-up sequence so every person who discovers Stage Stop once becomes a recurring customer — whether they ever come back to the Cape or not.
None of these require you to become a tech person. You make the candy. That part doesn't change. What changes is that the business keeps working when the season ends and the summer crowd goes home.
Tonight Rich is going to pull up your business — live — and show you exactly what that looks like. Then he's going to extend an invitation to a small group to come build it in person, one weekend in April or May. The people in that room tonight are the ones who get that call. You need to be there.