Helpful In The Hire · Ace Hardware Home Services Sprint

Who This Is For

This page is written for Michelle Young, the President carrying Ace into the home.

Before any of the proposal, the page puts AHHS on the record. Everything that follows is written for you specifically: a 102-year-old brand that just stepped into the home, the skilled-labor shortage you are racing against, and the words you used on our May 8 call.

The Brand

Ace Hardware. A 102-year-old brand. The helpful folks. The red-vested heroes who help homeowners get what they need to make their homes a more beautiful place to live. Now extending that helpfulness from the aisle into the home through plumbing, cooling, and electric.

The Company

Ace Hardware Home Services. A subsidiary of Ace Hardware. Skilled-labor delivery in plumbing, cooling, and electric. Live today in Philadelphia, Southern New Jersey, the Lehigh Valley, and Dayton, with the East Coast first and the rest of the United States to follow. A business in growth mode with the parent brand’s 102 years of trust as its lead asset.

The Operator

You as President of Ace Hardware Home Services, reporting directly to the CEO of Ace Hardware Corporate. Decision maker. Budget holder. The leader carrying the helpful-in-the-aisle story into helpful-in-the-home, with people, customers, and community as the through-line.

What You Want

In your words on our call: hire for character, train for skill. Grow our own. Tell a story compelling enough that A-players want to come on this journey with us. Capture the momentum the brand is building today, before the window closes.

The Problem

Three problems you described on our call, in the order you named them.

You described the situation at Ace Hardware Home Services on three levels: the visible version, the version that costs you week to week, and the deeper question about the moment AHHS is in. All three live below, attributed, close to your words.

What You Are Dealing With The Visible Problem

A drastic shortage of skilled laborers, and hiring alone is not going to cut it.

“On the home services side, we’re skilled laborers, and so there is a drastic shortage of skilled laborers in our marketplace today. Hiring isn’t going to cut it. We’ve got to grow and develop the workforce that we need in order to deliver the results that we want tomorrow.”

The plumbing, cooling, and electric trades do not have enough qualified people for the demand AHHS is already seeing. Recruiting is not optional and training is not optional, but neither one alone closes the gap. AHHS has to find people fast and grow them on the job, in parallel, in markets that are still scaling. The two motions have to compound, not compete for the same hour.

What It Is Costing You How It Feels Week To Week

The story AHHS tells today is not pulling A-players in.

“Today our messaging isn’t compelling enough to attract A-players. We need to do a better job of telling our story and getting the right people aligned with it, so that they want to come on this journey with us.”

AHHS has the strongest story in the trades sitting one floor above it: a 102-year-old helpful brand stepping into the home. The story should pull A-players in on its own. Right now it is not, because the version of the story that lands at the recruiting front door is the generic trades-jobs version, not the helpful-in-the-aisle-to-helpful-in-the-home version. Every week the wrong version is the published version is a week the right candidates self-select out instead of in.

What Is At Stake The Deeper Question

The momentum window is open, and it does not stay open forever.

“If we don’t solve this hiring problem in the next 12 to 24 months, we will miss this momentum that’s building with our organization today. We’re starting to pick up more market share. The Ace brand is super strong and people are really resonating with Ace Hardware Home Services. Millions of dollars of lost revenue.”

A 102-year-old brand making its move into the home is a moment that does not repeat. Market share is being captured now. Demand is showing up now. If the workforce is not in place to meet that demand, the demand finds a competitor with worse trust and a worse story. That is the question this page exists to answer. Sit with it for a moment before you keep reading.

How This Compares

What AHHS would otherwise do, and what each of those does not solve.

There are four real options for the hiring-story problem you named. None of them are wrong. But each one solves part of the situation and leaves another part open. The Sprint is on this page because it is built for the part the others leave behind.

Option · 01 $120K to $200K loaded annual cost

Hire a senior employer-brand or recruiting marketing leader.

Three to six months of recruiting before the seat is filled, then another quarter to ramp. Two-year payback at the earliest. Solves the bandwidth problem on a long timeline, but does not put the helpful-in-the-aisle-to-helpful-in-the-home story at the recruiting front door for another six months. The momentum window narrows in the meantime. The Sprint installs the recruiting system in Michelle’s seat in five days, before any new seat would have ramped.

Option · 02 $15K to $40K a month, ongoing

Put a recruiting-marketing agency on retainer.

Ships output. Does not own the story. Twelve months in, AHHS has spent $180K to $480K and the agency still does not know the helpful-folks voice the way Ace knows it. Every campaign is a translation pass through a vendor, and the version that lands sounds like trades-jobs marketing, not Ace. The Sprint puts the Ace voice and the Ace story at the source, in an agent Michelle owns, so any agency you use ships to a clean brand brief instead of guessing at one.

Option · 03 $1K to $5K a month per tool

Add more recruiting software (ATS, sourcing platforms, AI copy tools).

Adds funnel mechanics. Does not change the story going through the funnel. The bottleneck at AHHS is not how to post a job; it is what the post says when an A-player reads it. Better tools sending the same generic message does not change the conversion rate. The Sprint installs the agent that writes the right message, so the tools you already have start converting the candidates the brand deserves.

Option · 04 Free to $20 a month, plus your weekends

Learn AI yourself with ChatGPT or Claude.

Possible in theory. The cost is not the subscription, it is the calendar. Six to nine months of weekend learning to reach where the Sprint puts you on Day 4. At the end you have prompts. Prompts are not a system. You do not own a Chief of Staff file the agents read every morning, you do not own the Agent Builder, and the next AHHS function cannot run the same playbook because there is no playbook. The Sprint is not the AI-learning option. The Sprint is the AI-installed-in-your-seat option. Different category, not a faster version of the same category.

About The Program

QAIZR’s Five-Day Agent Sprint, sized for one President’s seat.

Two things, in this order: what Ace Hardware Home Services is plugging into, and who is in the room with you every day. Methodology first, deliverer second, so each can be judged on its own merit.

What This Is · What This Is Not

Not training. Not consulting. Not an agency engagement. Not software. The Sprint is a category of one: an Agent Installation. Five days, one hour each, with Brian leading live and a small cohort of other senior operators in the room. Agents built on real AHHS work, sharpened against real peer work. Methodology you keep. Day-4 outcome or every dollar back.

Built For

Senior operators carrying a brand-led growth motion against a workforce-supply ceiling. Stated values that need to show up in the hiring story, not just on the wall. Documented urgency to capture market share inside a defined window. Buyers who want ROI inside the same week, not next quarter. Operators who have sixty minutes a day, five days running, for one focused week of work. Michelle is the profile this is built for.

Not Built For

Multi-team enterprise rollouts. Async, self-paced training programs. Fully done-for-you delivery where the operator does not show up live. Buyers who want a tool to manage instead of a methodology to own. If that is your situation, one of the four alternatives above is the better starting point. The Sprint stays built for the situation Michelle described on May 8.

What You Are Plugging Into QAIZR’s methodology, sharpened across senior-operator engagements.

A People-Powered, AI-Accelerated installation methodology that fits inside one hour a day.

The arc AHHS will run is QAIZR’s Five-Day Agent Sprint, refined across QAIZR engagements with senior operators and proven across industries from finance to HR to client services. AHHS is joining a methodology already tested on real organizations, walking out with a working agent on real recruiting work. The methodology is yours to keep and re-run on the next function: technician training, dispatch coordination, customer follow-up, whichever motion needs the same amplification next.

Who Is In The Room With You Brian Audia, founder and CEO of QAIZR.

Brian Audia spent two decades building People + Process systems for organizations under pressure to do more with less. He installs the AI-Accelerated layer on top so a senior operator ships like a ten-person team.

As founder and CEO of QAIZR, Brian’s work is grounded in one conviction: business is a tool for human flourishing. The People-Powered, AI-Accelerated stack he installs at Ace Hardware Home Services starts with your actual seat (your skilled-trades workforce reality, your East-Coast operating footprint, your helpful-in-the-aisle-to-helpful-in-the-home story), turns it into a Chief of Staff file the agents read every morning, then builds the agents that take recruiting-story work off your desk so you can spend the back half of the week leading the growth instead of writing about it.

Days To A Working Agent

QAIZR’s Sprint format installs a working agent in five one-hour sessions, not five months. The agent is live by Day 4, scored on camera against an advisor-derived rubric.

90MIN

Total Daily Investment

Sixty minutes live with the cohort, plus about thirty minutes of applied work on a real AHHS hiring need. Built into Michelle’s schedule, not stacked on top of it.

$1K

Founding Cohort Price

Five thousand dollars of comparable work, packaged for one thousand for the founding cohort that locks Mon May 18. The price moves to fifteen hundred after that.

Five Things The Alternatives Do Not Have Verifiable nouns, not adjectives.

Day-4 Guarantee.

Refundable on a Day-4 trigger. If your agent does not pass Level 4 on camera by Thursday, your $1,000 returns the same week. The risk sits on QAIZR’s side; you do not carry it.

Live cohort, not async.

Brian leads each session in real time, with a small group of other senior operators in the room. Michelle’s agent reflects AHHS’s actual brand voice and hiring profile, sharpened against how peers solve the same problem in their seats.

The Agent Builder.

The agent that builds the rest, in your hands after Day 3. Every future agent at AHHS (training, dispatch, follow-up, retention) is a one-hour build, not a quarterly project.

Methodology playbook.

The Sprint stays in your Operate folder after Day 5. The next function at AHHS runs the same five-day arc next month. AHHS owns the playbook; QAIZR is not on retainer.

Ninety minutes a day total.

Lives inside your week, not stacked on top of it. Sixty minutes live with the cohort, about thirty minutes of applied work on a real AHHS hiring need. No travel, no platform fees. The recruiting system is live on Day 5, not next quarter.

What Prior Cohort Operators Said

Three voices from the founding cohort runs that came before this one.

Sprint operators in their own words after Day 5. Verbatim, attributed, named.

“First AI training I’ve taken where I walk out with a working system in hand.”

Tommy Rhoads

Sprint Cohort · April 2026

“I don’t even know what a Python script is, and I now have an AI system that updates my entire business operating system every night at 2 AM while I sleep.”

Katie Milton Jordan

CEO, SimpleEDO.ai · Sprint Cohort

“With most courses I end up being better informed. Six days into this one I’m a badass looking for better problems to solve with the skills I’ve learned.”

Richard Nicholas

Sprint Cohort · April 2026

The Plan

You weighed the alternatives. Now the question is what five days actually look like.

Two things below, on purpose. The promise underneath, and the sequence of days that delivers it. Both on the page, so saying yes is the easy part, and so you can think it over with the actual shape of the week in front of you.

The Promise What You Are Guaranteed

Michelle, you show up for one sixty-minute live session a day for five days, the week of May 18, alongside a small cohort of other senior operators running the same build on their own businesses. Between sessions you put roughly thirty minutes into applied work on a real AHHS hiring need: a job post, a technician spotlight, a recruiter outreach script, whatever is on the desk that week. Not theory. Not make-believe. The agent we build is an agent you can use the next morning. Brian reviews progress in the cohort channel and the rest of the cohort sharpens the work alongside you. By the end of Day 4 you have a working A-Player Recruiting Agent at Level 4, scored on camera against an advisor-derived rubric. Day 5 is the bake-off and the next-week roadmap. That is what the one thousand dollars buys, in writing, on this page.

The Guarantee Day-4 Or Every Dollar Back

If the AHHS President’s seat does not have a working agent at Level 4 by the end of Day 4, scored on camera, every dollar comes back. No clauses, no carve-outs. The risk lives on QAIZR’s side of the agreement, not Ace’s.

DAY 01 · MON MAY 18

The Executive AI Operating System.

Install the mental model before anyone builds anything. The Eight Levels of AI Execution, from Manual through Documented, Workflow, Agent, Orchestration, Swarm, Self-Governing, Portfolio. We place where the AHHS recruiting motion sits today (mostly Level 0 to 1 inside the President’s seat; some Level 2 in any agency-partner workflow), where Level 4 is, and the orders of magnitude in between. Then we open the workspace together and stand up your Ace Hardware Home Services Operate folder, the value chain across the talent motion, and the GAAPC structure inside each function: Goals, Advisors, Agents, Projects, Contacts.

DAY 02 · TUE MAY 19

Your Chief of Staff File.

Yesterday we built the body. Today we give it a brain. The Chief of Staff file is the standing context every AHHS agent reads before doing any work. We build yours together in the hour, tuned to the brand: ICP for talent (the A-players AHHS is built to attract), the helpful-folks brand voice encoded as rules, the trades you serve (plumbing, cooling, electric), the East-Coast operating footprint and the national expansion roadmap, the hire-for-character / train-for-skill ethos, the corporate reporting line, and the parent-brand language AHHS inherits from 102 years of Ace Hardware. The file grows with you. Start with three sections; add rules as you find patterns.

DAY 03 · WED MAY 20

Build Your First Agent · The Agent Builder.

You have the system. You have the brain. Now you give it hands. Not a prompt, an agent. The Five-File Agent Structure, always the same: Start Here, Golden Example, Process, Context, Quality. Then the meta-move: the Agent Builder, the agent that builds all your other agents. Point it at any repeating deliverable in the AHHS talent motion (recruiting copy, technician spotlight stories, hiring-event content, recruiter outreach scripts) and it stands up the next agent for you. By the end of this session you have at least one working agent: the A-Player Recruiting Agent. It pulls from the helpful-in-the-aisle-to-helpful-in-the-home story you carry, drafts recruiting-channel copy in the Ace voice, and outputs ready-for-channel posts, ads, scripts, and emails Michelle reviews instead of authors.

DAY 04 · THU MAY 21

Make It Better, Measurably · Day-5 Confirmation.

The first pass is never the best pass. Good once is luck, good on purpose is a method. We run the 3-3-3 method live on Michelle’s agent. Pick an advisor (Bill Bernbach for craft, David Ogilvy for brand voice, Seth Godin for permission marketing in trades hiring), the advisor is the rubric, four to six criteria scored one to ten, three rounds of three improvements, never edit the source file. Michelle scores her agent against the rubric. This is also where the Day-5 outcome is confirmed: the A-Player Recruiting Agent at Level 4, scored, on camera. Then we frame Week Two.

DAY 05 · FRI MAY 22

The Bake-Off & Where Week Two Goes.

The session that pulls forward what comes next. We run a friendly bake-off: the agent built during the week is reviewed once more against alternative drafts, the strongest version wins. Then we walk Levels 5 to 8 (Orchestration, Swarm, Self-Governing, Portfolio) using examples from prior cohorts. Ace Hardware Home Services leaves with a clear picture of where Week Two takes you: the natural Level-5 candidate is a Recruiting-Funnel Agent feeding the A-Player Recruiting Agent, so the talent motion runs through one connected system instead of three disconnected ones. Same role, same brand voice, every AHHS function able to run the same Sprint next.

The Offer

Everything Ace Hardware Home Services gets for the next five days, on one page.

The investment on the left. The daily rhythm on the right. Nothing hidden, nothing deferred, nothing that arrives later.

Math, Plain

You named the cost of leaving the hiring story unsolved at millions of dollars of lost revenue over the next 12 to 24 months. The Sprint costs $1,000. Skilled-trades recruiting cycles in plumbing, cooling, and electric routinely run 60 to 90 days from posting to offer. If the A-Player Recruiting Agent compresses one technician cycle by even 30 days, that is one earlier truck in the field, one earlier billable revenue stream, and one fewer week of demand routed to a competitor. Most recruiting agencies cost five times this Sprint per month and do not leave the agent in your seat at the end.

$1,000

Founding Cohort · Locks Mon May 18 · $1,500 After

One flat investment covering five days, five live sessions, and Michelle’s seat in the founding cohort.

A single flat per-seat investment for Michelle’s full engagement. Michelle in the room for every session, with Brian leading live and a small group of other senior operators running the same build on their own businesses alongside her, so the learning compounds across seats. One price, one invoice, no platform fees, no surprise line items at the end.

The Agreement What is included, what each item is worth.

What You Are Buying	Comparable
Five 60-minute live sessions with Brian, Mon through Fri.	$1,500
Ace Hardware Home Services Chief of Staff file, built live in Day 02.	$750
A-Player Recruiting Agent + the Agent Builder, built live in Day 03.	$1,500
Day-4 Level-4 confirmation + advisor-rubric scoring.	$750
Methodology playbook, yours to re-run on every AHHS function.	$500
Total comparable value	$5,000

Five live sessions with Brian, sixty minutes each.
The Ace Hardware Home Services Operate folder & GAAPC structure, stood up live in Day 01.
The Ace Hardware Home Services Chief of Staff file, built live with Michelle in Day 02.
A working agent at Level 4 by Day 03: the A-Player Recruiting Agent as the natural first build.
The Agent Builder in your hands, so the next agent is a Week-Two build, not a quarterly project.
Day-4 confirmation: agent scored on camera against an advisor-derived rubric.
The Week-Two roadmap and the bake-off, locked in Day 05.
Daily coaching from Brian between sessions, in the cohort channel.
Access to the QAIZR cohort channel and context library for the duration of the Sprint.
Day-4 Guarantee: working agent at Level 4 or every dollar back.

The Daily Rhythm What each day looks like.

One live session a day, applied work between, a peer cohort sharpening it alongside you.

Each day follows the same cadence so Michelle is never guessing when the next thing is happening. Show up live with a small cohort of other senior operators, ship real work in your own business, get coached, repeat for five days.

One sixty-minute live session each day, same time, Mon through Fri, with the cohort in the room.
About thirty minutes a day of applied work on a real AHHS hiring need: a job post, a technician spotlight, a recruiter outreach script.
Not theory. Not make-believe. The agents built during the Sprint are agents you can use the next morning.
Brian reviews progress and leaves coaching notes daily in the cohort channel.
Peer learning across the cohort: you see how other operators solve the same problem in their seats, and they see how you solve it in yours.
Day 4: the agent scored on camera. Day 5: bake-off and Week Two roadmap.

What Is At Stake

What happens if this conversation ends here and the hiring story stays where it is.

No manufactured risk. These four costs are already showing up inside Ace Hardware Home Services week over week. They are on the page because they are the reason we are having this conversation in the first place.

Risk · 1

The 12 to 24-month momentum window narrows.

In your words: the brand is super strong, market share is being captured, people are resonating with Ace Hardware Home Services right now. A window of that quality does not stay open by inertia. Every quarter the hiring story is generic is a quarter the helpful-in-the-aisle-to-helpful-in-the-home advantage erodes against competitors who do not have it but are louder than AHHS today.

Risk · 2

Demand finds a competitor instead of finding AHHS.

Customers ready to buy plumbing, cooling, and electric service today do not wait for the workforce that does not exist yet. The leads are being generated. They will land somewhere. Without the hiring engine to convert them, the brand pays the cost of the demand it created and the competitor collects the revenue. You named the dollar magnitude on the call: millions.

Risk · 3

The A-players self-select out instead of in.

The technicians, electricians, and plumbers AHHS most wants to hire have options. The job posts they read decide whether the brand earns a conversation. When the recruiting story is generic trades-jobs language, the people who would have come on this journey with you read it as another job and keep scrolling. The wrong story does not just slow hiring; it filters out the very people AHHS is built to attract.

Risk · 4

The system on paper stops mattering.

AHHS already has the values, the brand, the trades footprint, the corporate reporting line, the parent-company trust. None of it is the problem. The problem is the human enforcement layer between the values and the hiring story that gets published. Without an agent in the loop, the values stay on the wall, the recruiting copy stays generic, and the disconnect between Ace’s story and AHHS’s hiring funnel compounds.

The Outcome

Tuesday of the following week the talent motion at Ace Hardware Home Services is different. Here is what different looks like.

One resolved problem per row, mapped to what you named on our call. The future below is a specific one, built around the AHHS President’s seat, the trades workforce reality, and the helpful-in-the-aisle-to-helpful-in-the-home story Michelle wants told before the candidate hits apply, not after.

Resolved · 1

You walk out with a working agent at Level 4, plus the Agent Builder.

An A-Player Recruiting Agent as the natural first build, owned by Michelle, running on real AHHS recruiting needs and scored on camera against an advisor-derived rubric. Then the Agent Builder, the agent that builds the rest, in your hands, so the next agent (a Recruiting-Funnel Agent) is a Week-Two build, not a quarterly project.

Resolved · 2

The Ace Hardware Home Services Chief of Staff file is live and every agent reads it first.

The helpful-folks brand voice, the trades footprint, the East-Coast-to-national operating arc, the hire-for-character / train-for-skill ethos, the parent-brand language: in one place, maintained by Michelle. Every future agent reads it before acting. The work the President does once stops having to be re-explained every time.

Resolved · 3

Recruiting copy that sounds like Ace, not like trades-jobs marketing.

The A-Player Recruiting Agent drafts the job posts, the technician-spotlight stories, the hiring-event content, the recruiter outreach scripts in the Ace voice from the first pass. Michelle reviews instead of authoring. The wrong version stops being the published version. A-players self-select in instead of out.

Resolved · 4

A second agent in the chain is one Sprint away.

The Recruiting-Funnel Agent feeds candidate flow into the A-Player Recruiting Agent’s output. Together they catch the demand the Ace brand is creating and convert it into hires inside the 12 to 24-month window you named, instead of letting it leak to competitors with worse trust and worse stories.

Resolved · 5

AHHS has a methodology, not a vendor relationship.

After Day 5, the Sprint methodology lives in your Operate folder. The next function at AHHS (technician training, dispatch, customer follow-up, retention) gets its own Sprint, its own Chief of Staff section, its own agent. Ace Hardware Home Services owns the playbook. The Sprint becomes the template the company runs.

Resolved · 6

The hire sounds different.

The candidate reads the post and sees Ace, not generic trades marketing. The technician hired this quarter feels the helpful-folks ethos in the onboarding. The community sees the red-vested-heroes story extended, with skilled tradespeople in the home delivering the same trust the aisle has earned for 102 years. The story tells itself. The work stops being against you.

The Close

What You Just Read

Five days, one live hour a day with a small cohort of other senior operators, plus about thirty minutes of applied work on real AHHS hiring needs. Mon May 18 through Fri May 22. An A-Player Recruiting Agent that drafts recruiting copy in the Ace voice. A Recruiting-Funnel Agent named as Week Two’s natural next build. The methodology in AHHS’s Operate folder for every function after this one. Five thousand dollars of comparable work, packaged as the founding investment, yours for one thousand. Day-4 Guarantee: agent at Level 4 or every dollar back.

Helpful in the aisle. Helpful in the home. Now, helpful in the hire.

Michelle, you came to the call ready. In a few minutes you named the workforce problem, the messaging gap, and the cost of inaction. You said hiring alone is not going to cut it, that AHHS has to grow its own, that today’s message is not compelling enough to attract A-players, and that the cost of leaving it is millions of dollars of lost revenue inside the next 12 to 24 months. The Sprint is the five-day version of the move that fixes that, run live in a cohort of other senior operators so the learning compounds across seats. One hour a day live with the cohort, about thirty minutes of applied work between sessions on real AHHS hiring needs, a working agent by Day 4, the A-Player Recruiting Agent in your seat by the end of the week, the methodology yours to run on every AHHS function from there. You weighed four real alternatives on this page. The Sprint is the one built for the situation you described.

When you are ready, lock the Sprint for the week of May 18 and we go. QAIZR will send a one-page agreement and the $1,000 invoice within 24 hours of your reply.

What Happens After You Reply

Within 24 hours. QAIZR sends a one-page agreement and the $1,000 invoice. Single payment, single line item.
Next week. Five calendar invites for the live cohort sessions, the cohort channel link, and the Day 1 prep note land in Michelle’s inbox.
Mon May 18, Day 1, 3:00 PM Central, live via virtual video link. Stand up the AHHS Operate folder and place the recruiting motion on the Eight Levels of AI Execution.
Thu May 21, Day 4. The A-Player Recruiting Agent is scored on camera against the advisor-derived rubric. Pass at Level 4 or above and the engagement continues. Not pass and the full $1,000 returns the same week. No questions, no carve-outs.

Lock The Sprint · $1,000

Michelle, five days to a working A-Player Recruiting Agent.